


The Unforgetting

by NuclearMeatball



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy, Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Canon Compliant, Drama, F/M, Family Drama, Gen, Science Fiction
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-07-16
Updated: 2017-04-17
Packaged: 2018-04-09 16:30:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 21,985
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4356290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NuclearMeatball/pseuds/NuclearMeatball
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He often dreamt about the winter when he first met her. After dark, in the dim blue of his room, the memory would flit up before him, bright and silent, never changing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prelude

**Author's Note:**

> In retrospect, I'm not really happy with how this is written (I wrote it six years ago, and I don't plan to edit anything I wrote so I don't change the spirit of the story), but what's going on in this scene will probably become more clear later. I'm actually sort of excited to tell this story. For the record, I've gone ahead and labelled it T not because of anything sexual, but because I've realised that this might get rather dark. There's also a couple characters who curse quite a lot. Just being safe, is all.

HE OFTEN DREAMT ABOUT THE WINTER when he first met her. After dark, in the dim blue of his room, the memory would flit up before him, bright and silent, never changing. He saw the simple yellow banner that read "Happy Birthday" and the loud neon balloons scattered across the floor. The drifting snow blew up against the red chestnut double doors. From his window he saw her walking toward those doors-a tiny, pale child with bright, tilting eyes, a pink mouth, and hair like an ink brush.

He remembered. That winter, he could not stay warm. He had wrapped himself in a heavy coat and wound his neck in woollen scarves, but the chill soaked deep beneath his skin and swirled into every crevice of the tiny house, frosting over the windowpane glass pictures he had traced with numb fingers. He was perched unmovingly on the window sill, his eyes fixed outside to keep himself from falling. He sat, as he had for hours, watching the snow make bright white flecks in the dim yellow porch lights.

It was then that he had seen her.

The girl and her mother had arrived near dusk and waited, confident and expectant, at the doorstep. He had appraised the girl with careful curiosity as his own mother whirled into the room to welcome the guests with an air of wounded relief. The woman at the door, he had reflected, he recognised with a sort of detached familiarity. She had visited occasionally, now this afternoon, now the next, a brief visit each holiday, the single patron of both his and his mother's birthday parties—and always greeted his mother with a hug and a kiss on the cheek, and often with gifts for her "favourite neighbour and her cute little son." He had not been able identify the girl. She might have passed his little window a dozen times before, but he could not remember seeing her before that evening. His mother lifted him from the sill and introduced him. He had stared with intense interest.

The four of them sat at the cramped dining table. He was dimly aware of his mother pouring tea, and when he received his own tea, he looked down at the swirl of leaves in the water. A single leaf drifted and slid against the white and blue cup, then began to float, upright. He felt the heat of the steam on his cold face. He had grasped at the cup's warmth.

He listened absently as his mother laughed sadly at something the other woman said. She had assured his mother that the party had been a good idea. Next year, she ardently promised, she would spread word. Next year, she would not come alone. He lost interest, and chanced another look at the girl.

She had not touched her tea, and she returned his gaze with equal curiosity. He decided, with finality, that she had strangely coloured eyes.

He slumped farther into his coat. He had noticed she had worn only a yellow dress and tall white stockings underneath her deep blue jacket. He began to fidget nervously. He could not help himself:

Wasn't she cold?

She shook her head dispassionately. He offered her his jacket. She refused, offering him instead a small smile. Her eyes followed the line of his face, his throat, his coat, back up to his ruffled yellow hair. She had clutched suddenly at her mother's elbow, declaring loudly that she wanted to go home. Her mother had chided her softly. Then she glanced at her watch. She apologised and stood up abruptly. She seized her bag, and there was bright flash of silver, now in her hand, now on the table, as she produced two boxes. She squeezed his mother's hand, and she and her daughter began to head for the door.

He and his mother had followed. The four stood at the door for a moment; the two woman had exchanged embraces. He clung to his mother's skirt, abruptly light-headed and timid. He peeked shyly at the girl, then her mother. The girl gazed bashfully back. Her mother regarded the two with mild amusement. He had glanced at her mother again, and she pulled him into a loose hug. She stood, again smiling at his mother, and walked out the door.

The girl paused. She ambled over to his mother, eyes downcast, ears red against the dark of her hair. She hug his mother, quickly, awkwardly around the legs, the faintest murmur of "happy birthday" tumbling out in a gentle whisper. She backed slowly away, catching his eyes with the slightest suggestion of a smile. She had waved at him exuberantly, then chased after her mother into the swirl of white snow and damp moonlight.

For the first time, he had felt warm.


	2. Movement I - Adagio

THE ONLY THING HE HAD REALLY LIKED about his boyhood surroundings was the forests north of the village at the mouth of the mountains, a dense tangle of virgin jungle through which flowed a wide, swift river he called Queen Lir. It hadn’t been polluted then, and the rippling water yielded loach, black carp, shark minnow, and rare paddlefish. Sunlight slanted green and thin through the gaps in the canopy, and there was small animals amongst the trees—a confused mountain deer or two—but most of all the intimation of a wild past, when roughened feet trod the dappled forest trails and dugouts cruised the waters that snaked into the sun-stricken mountain passes. Once in a while, he found rusted hilts and broken metal wheels in the loamy riverbanks, and when twilight fell and he returned home, he sneaked cautiously into his room and hid his secret discoveries amongst his treasures. After darkness fell, when he lay awake, he would run his fingers over their ancient faces, and, looking at them, reverently dream of that distant time and wish he had lived then, before his world had become a land of sleek houses and store clerks.

His little village, he later supposed, had everything a tiny town was supposed to have: a dank, sprawling old school that was crumbling into itself; an unassuming grocer’s shop that smelt of old plaster and fresh floor wax, shelves lined with homemade bread and frozen peas; rows of woodfire-heated split-levels that banded around a well in the centre of a quaint town square; chimneyed one-stories that sagged decrepitly into cobbled, dirtless streets on which nothing ever happened.

At the town’s edge were the fields, and he remembered them as they were in the late autumn. The rice stubble was beige against the snow, withered husks rasping barrenly in the wind; tall bur-filled grasses waved oddly; and empty, weathered farmhouses swayed uncertainly, silently waiting for the townsmen to tear them down and drag their pieces back into a village that only ever expanded inward. On the horizon stood clusters of naked cypresses that stabbed upward into the bleak November sky. Looking back, he could still see himself, only six or seven, roaming out there restlessly when the mists descended and scaring birds from the fog nets, the tract houses behind him and the vast, vacant pastures in front—a young boy trapped between domestic boredom and mountainous desolation.

On days too cold to wander alone, he stayed inside with his mother, watching her slowly complete her seamstress work or helping her crush lime and cilantro into a hoisin sauce or, more frequently, skipping out of her reach when she batted him away for trying to dip his fingers into whatever she was preparing. Those days she lay beneath her sheets, too exhausted to sleep, but unable to move, he stared out the parlour window, wrapped warmly in his coat, murmuring softly to himself and thinking of the girl with the peculiar eyes and ink-black hair.

It was the music that drew him to her again.

An autumn evening three months after his seventh birthday, he sat beneath his open window, intently watching the white, wispy vapours that crystallised, then dissipated, as his breath mingled with the cool air. He sat up straight when he caught the thread of a piano melody, high and sweet as a woman’s voice, and froze. The sound rose up through the walls of his room, and drifted through his window; it shimmered through him, a sudden rush of colour, blooming past the grey one-stories, above the smoking chimneys and toward the narrow sky. He sat for a moment, drawing in a breath of cold, sweet air, and truly understood.

He got up, feeling at once giddy and breathless. The music still flowed sweetly, coursing through and behind the painted wall. He thought he could feel it charge in the air as it pulsed through the floor and wound around the stubborn beams and girders and slipped around him with a sudden high rhythm trilled in time with the beat of his heart.

And then, silence.

He moved cautiously to his window, tilting his forehead against the cold pane and closing his eyes. He thought he heard a single note then, and felt it through the glass like a current running all the way down his spine, the powerful tiny thrumming of a perfect “C.” When the music resumed, it was a slow controlled tune that ascended and descended clumsily in a careful pattern. Twice the notes climbed upwards and crept down again with the same cautious restraint, and on the third time he opened the window, glanced around carefully, and slipped out. The music was coming from the neighbour’s house--through the first storey window opposite his. He crept closer. It was shut and the drapes drawn, but if he squinted, he imagined he could see the grey spectre of a silhouette. He drew closer still, climbing onto the pressure unit, onto the tall, stiff hedges, and then the trellis leaning beneath the narrow sill. He hoisted himself up onto the ledge as silently as he could and pressed his face to the glass, straining to see through the pale blue curtain. He was sure that if he leant only a little farther, he would be able to peer beyond the drapes, and suddenly the matter of seeing through them had become an affair of irrational personal importance. But the drapes remained frustratingly opaque, and he drew his lips downward with aggravation. He had strained heroically then, his nose smashed carelessly against the glass and his eyes popped round like two blue buttons.

The music ended abruptly with an angry, discordant bang.

He started violently and tumbled into the bushes below. For a moment, he remembered, he had lain stunned on his back, staring at the clear, grey sky. He had thought, with a vague sort of detachment, that he had made a lot of noise, and he wondered if someone would come round and yell when they discovered he had been spying. He began to panic at that. He had not wanted anyone to yell.

He floundered at the branches clinging to his arms, frantically clawing leaves from his eyes. He sat up suddenly, peering wildly about for any red-faced adult who might catch him in his misdeed. He glanced upward, and froze immediately.

Gazing down at him had been the ink-haired girl. She held her face in her hands and stared with a curious intensity that frightened him. She didn’t blink.

He coiled into himself meekly, bracing in the expectation that she would scream for him to go away. He felt smarting tears begin to burn the back of his eyes. His mouth hung open.

She squinted.

“Hey,” she paused and frowned with a sudden twitch of her lips. “How come you got sticks in your hair?” When he did not answer, she drummed her fingers on the sill and leant closer. “How come you’re in the bushes?” She considered him for a moment, closing one eye. “Did you lose something?”

He stared blankly back at her, slack-jawed, voice withered up in his throat.

“‘Cause if you lose stuff, I can help find it. But you have to tell what is it, first.”

He shook his head, pointing to his window.

She stared uncomprehendingly. “You lost a house?” When he shook his head again, but still had not spoken, her forehead began to fold into a frustrated crease.

His mouth opened, but he had felt no need to correct her.

She leant farther, her face brightening with recognition and stretching into a broad smile. It had been then, he remembered, that the ache in his throat and the sting behind his eyes had receded.

“Hey, I know you! You’re Mama’s friend’s son!”

He was.

“You live in the house right there!”

He did.

She laughed. “You didn’t lose your house!”

No, he hadn’t.

For a moment, he sat there in silence, watching her grin down at him in amusement. Then, from over his shoulder, he heard the faint echo of his mother calling his name. He gave the girl one last look before bowing his head and hurriedly scrambling away.

* * *

She was going to regret it. He was going to get her. There were certain rules of engagement that they had already established, and she had broken all of them that very morning. He crouched behind the door, watching her come up the walkway. From beyond the wall, he heard a metallic rattle as she fumbled with the keys, then the whine of hinges as the door began to open.

As she stepped through the doorway, he sprang out at her knees, tripping her, and together they collapsed in a heap. For a moment they laid there, his mother trying her best to frown as she watched him dissolve into a high-pitched giggle that caused his entire body to shudder. Slowly, her frown wobbled into a smile, and then, a laugh. “You really shouldn’t laugh like that,” she said. “You sound like a turkey.” She flipped him over and began to tickle him, and he squirmed like a fish in her arms, his legs kicking over her shoulder so that he gazed at her upside-down. His mouth hung open in delight, and looking into his shining eyes, her lips began to twitch again. “Ticklebelly,” she said finally. “Onion head.”

He pushed away from her. “Tickling is cheating! I have to get you back for before!” He pushed some more.

“Yeah, well. Not tonight, kid.” She stifled a yawn and groaned. “I feel like ten thousand trains hit me. Way too tired to wrestle.”

He scowled up at her. “My name is not ‘kid.’”

“And my name is not ‘Mama’,” she countered. “But you don’t see me complaining.”

Watching as she moved away from him and shut the door, he allowed his scowl to deepen. “You’re always too tired for everything,” he accused.

“I’m never too tired for a hug.”

“That’s not true! Last week, you said—”

“All right, fine.”

“—And even before that—”

“Fine.” She scooped him up by the underarms and held him at arm’s length.

“—And the night before that, you came home and went straight to sleep—”

“Okay, I said!” She faked a glare. “Although it may have to be like that again, what with the way you’re bugging me. Looks like I’ve got a date with Sir Valium tonight.”

His mouth drew into a line.

“I was kidding!” She paused, giving him a faint smile. “But you’re right.” Her voice became faded, like he were hearing her from a great distance, and when she spoke, her words trembled slightly, as if her breath were thin and had stretched suddenly around a great bubble of emotion. “I’m sorry.” Cloud’s little face was absolutely stoic. He replied simply.

“It’s okay.”

She put him down, laughing, though he didn’t think he had said anything funny. She started toward the kitchen. “Maybe you should put me in the donations and exchange box. Get a different mom.”

He followed after her, his arms crossed. “You can’t trade people.”

His mother laughed again. “Oh, so that’s all that’s stopping you?” She turned back to him abruptly, bending so that their eyes were level. She hesitated for an instance, then began in earnest. “You know…Cloud, when you marry, marry someone older. Marry someone who’ll take good care of you.” She paused. “Don’t look at me like that. Yeah, I know you’re only seven. But trust me, you’ll need someone like that.” She tapped her chin thoughtfully. “And someone you’ll look good with, too. As good as Tifa and that Greene kid do.”

“Who?”

She waved at him dismissively, walking into the kitchen. “You know, that Harmon kid, the ginger-headed one. His parents used to own Gene’s store. Very cute, if you think of it. He and Tifa look good as friends. They’ll look even better as couple when they’re older.”

“No they don’t! No they won’t!”

“Oh?” She put a saucepan on the burner, shooting him a sly grin. “And why is that? Is it because you’d rather it be you instead?”

“No way!”

“Uh-huh. If you need me, I’ll be here. In the real world.”

“I’m not lying!” Cloud scowled at his mother, watching her calmly pour oil into the pan.

“I didn’t know Tifa disgusted you so much—”

“I didn’t say that!”

“So what’s the problem?”

“I? Well.” He could feel a flush climbing up his face. He wondered how it was that she always trapped him like this. “For one thing, her eyes are red—”

“Your eyes are blue.”

“—and she wears frilly dresses—”

“You wear frayed shorts.”

“—and she’s so small—”

“You’re not even four feet.”

“—she’s a little kid!”

“You’re eight months older than her.”

“She looks Wutai.”

“Look who’s talking.”

He paused. “Dad is from Wutai?” He stared at her, but she kept her back to him, dicing up an onion and putting it into the pan. For a while she stood there pushing it around with a spatula, and he thought that she would not answer at all. Finally she said, very slowly,

“I never said that.”

He stayed silent. He had become accustomed to this. Questions caused her pain. Once he had asked her a succession of them, and as she tried to answer, tears had come streaming out of her eyes. Her heaving body had frightened him; she seemed too grown up to be comforted. He had been so badly scared that he decided he did not need to know the answers after all. If they upset her, he would not ask for them.

“So Cloud.” He looked up at her. She was facing him now, putting something he didn’t know the name of into a pot. “How did your lessons go today?”

He twisted his face into an exaggerated expression of disgust so that she was certain to notice, but she only sniggered.

“That good?”

His mornings and afternoons were dominated by Ms Creedy, an enormous red-haired woman who had, as long as he could remember, never appeared without a slash of orange lipstick and sea-green paint around her eyes. When she taught, she loomed over him, her watery eyes rolling in her head like a fish’s. Always she kept one yellowed eye on him, the pupil floating in the middle like a black seed. Her face, too, was piscine, and locked in a perpetual sneer unless he answered incorrectly. Then, her lips would curl back and he would see the rows of large white teeth, as if she were going to swallow him down in one piece.

“I don’t like her.”

“I know you don’t,” his mother sighed. “But since you’re not at the school with the rest of them anymore, it’s not like we’ve got a choice. It’s freaking miracle I could even convince her to come here in the first place.”

“How come I can’t just read the books instead?”

“You’re not old enough for that kind of thing.” And she turned back to the stove.

“That’s not fair!”

"'Not fair' is slaving for hours baking a dozen separate cakes with frosting roses and sugar peonies and green vines for a bunch of ungrateful brats who order you to clean up the mess they just made then stuff their selfish faces and tell you it tastes like dirt." She tapped the pan's edge with the spatula, a little too forcefully. She sounded angry, as though this was something that happened recently.

But when she turned back to him, she was smiling and her eyebrows arched high up on her forehead. “Let me tell you a story.” She sat down in the chair opposite his.

“When I learnt that you were on the way, I was a circus acrobat. Six months I flipped back and forth on those bars, my belly growing bigger and bigger. I was forced to travel, then, to a village owned by a very rich man who cared for no one but himself. In the middle of the village was his mansion, which had such a high ceiling, that when you looked up at it, it were as if you were looking into the sky. The windows weren’t like normal ones, either; they were coloured and the sills were so high you couldn’t see over them--no, not even if you stood on tiptoe. When I came to that village, I had nothing but the clothes on my back, and even those were coming apart. I begged the rich man for a job, but he said he had no place for me, no place for a woman who was going to have a child. I went to the mansion daily, cleaning and cooking without invitation. I begged and begged, but he still refused. Every day I appeared, and every day he would refuse me, getting angrier and angrier. It was his wife—his second one—who finally convinced him to hire me. He had two—no three—wives, that man. The first one was a gnarled old woman who had grown bitter because she hadn’t had any kids, and the third was troubled and kept locked up in a room that I never saw. The second wife was lonely, but kind. She was very pretty and had very long, very black hair and big brown eyes, and she wasn’t much older than I was. Her name was Pipa, and she took pity on me because she saw the way I would scrub the mansion for free till my knuckles showed to the white bone, just so I could make sure you had a future. So I lived in the servants’ quarters. From November to June, I worked harder than any servant there, and I would have kept working too, but there was a terrible accident. The mansion caught fire one night, and it burnt to the ground. I was drawing water from the well outside at the time, so I didn’t need to escape.”

His mother paused and cast her eyes to the ceiling. She rose, poured herself a glass of water, and returned to her seat. She stared at the glass, swilling the water slowly.

“But I remembered Pipa’s kindness. And there were many still trapped inside. So I went to them. In the end I managed to pull the master and his wives out of the mansion, and the rest of the servant girls managed to get out too. After it was all over, no one was hurt, but the house wasn’t so lucky. It burnt and burnt until there was nothing left but a lump of charcoal on the ground. The master wept to see it because he loved his things more than he loved anyone, and now he was as poor as everyone else in village. Maybe poorer. A lot of the servants wept too, because it was the only home they’d ever known. I felt sorry for them. But me? There was no job for me anymore. I knew I had to go. So I said my goodbyes and left the next morning. I’d saved a little bit of money too, so I wasn’t so worried. I went east until finally I stumbled across a proper town. It wasn’t a huge one, but it had over seven hundred people there and actual pavement, so it was more than I had ever seen. But even so, I knew off the bat there was no work there for me. It was a town of gamblers, though they called themselves ‘apprentices of chance.’ They made their money from chocobo races, all of them. But what could I do? Your father was across the world fighting, and I was running out of money. So I went in anyway. The richest man in town was a man named Stefen, a real gentleman. I asked him where I could find some work, but he just shrugged and said there was no place for skills like mine. I could help set up for the EIS Derby, the biggest chocobo race of the region, but it wouldn’t pay much since the whole town would be helping with that. The money wouldn’t even take me to the next village. Then he joked that maybe I could join the race myself since the prize money was ten thousand gil. Then he looked like this when I told him I was going to.”

Her eyes popped out so that Cloud could see the whites. Her mouth widened to an O.

“Anyway,” she continued. “I spent the last of my gil on some greens. You wouldn’t think they’d be so expensive when they taste so bad. But they were. So I put them to good use. In the end, I could only catch a little baby chocobo, one that was barely on its own, barely out of the shell. But it had to do. Under Stefen’s direction, I trained that thing night and day, until neither of us could stand to hear one more wark or kweh kweh. When the morning of the race rolled around, I was so nervous that I threw up three times, though that could’ve been the morning sickness too, who knows. Point is, I jumped on that chocobo and ran that race to the end, even though my head was spinning and I thought I would die if I bounced around anymore. And I won too. A whole ten thousand gil, all mine. Stefen couldn’t believe it. Neither could I. It was the funniest thing ever. I gave him half of the prize money, and I made him promise to take care of Fuzz—my chocobo. Then I waddled right out of that town, travelled all the way across the continent until I ended up here, where I used the rest of the money to build this house. It was the forests and mountains that got me.”

She paused and looked up at him with a small smile. “And then you came along,” she continued softly. “And made life much better. Your old mother’s been through a whole lot, so just give her a more time. You can stand Ms Creedy till then, can’t you?”

Cloud stared at her blankly for a moment, an expression of confusion creeping across his face as his eyebrows drew together.

Then he scowled.

“You’re lying.”

His mother looked taken aback. “What do you mean?”

“That’s not possible, no way! You couldn’t have done all that and had me!”

“Oh? And how do you figure? How many times have you been pregnant?”

“I just did the math! You said that you were in the circus for six months, but then you worked for another seven. And it takes a whole entire year to raise baby chocobos big enough to race them, which means you would’ve been pregnant for two years!”

She smirked at him. “Seems like you’re learning plenty from Ms Creedy. Clearly you should stay with her after all.”

He stared at her, mouth agape.

“You tricked me!”

She shrugged. “Maybe if you kept at your lessons, you wouldn’t be tricked so easily, right? Am I right or am I right?”

He leant back into his chair, scowling at her sourly. He had a pattern for falling for her jokes, and this, of all of them, he should have seen through. “I bet you made that whole story up, too.” He crossed his arms when she laughed at him.

“Not too far back you would have believed it, though.” In reply, he turned around in his seat so that his back faced her.

“Oh, come on, Cloud. You know I’m just teasing. And I—” She got up suddenly and ran to the stove with an oath. She looked up and sighed. “It’s burnt all right.” She was quiet for a moment, as if waiting for him to respond, but he kept his back to her, making a great show of ignoring her. When she didn’t tap between his shoulder blades or tug his nose as he expected, he looked back slowly over his shoulder. She was silently standing over the stove, leaning over the burnt pan with her eyes closed and the thumb and fingers of her left hand squeezing her temples.

“Mama?”

When she didn’t answer, he slipped out of his chair and walked to her, fitting the palm of his hand against her own. “Do you want me to go outside so you can say bad words?” This made her chuckle. She squeezed his hand and ruffled his hair with her other, gently dragging her nails across his scalp in a way that almost instantly made his body feel hazy with sleep. She sighed softly, and pushed the pan to the back of the stove. Releasing his hand, she bent down with a deliberate slowness and pulled a small hotplate from the cabinets. Knowing what this meant, Cloud struggled to suppress a wave of excitement as he ran to retrieve his shoes and shrug on the worn, blue jacket he had left draped over the back of the parlour room armchair. When he finished, his mother was already waiting, holding a small duffel bag, by the doorway. Taking his hand, together they stepped through the open door, his mother pausing only to lock it behind them.

Outside, the light had not yet receded. The sun hung teetering over the edge of the horizon—lingering in this early autumn as it had in the summer—and bathing the village in an auburn-yellow light that would remain for hours more. When night fell, Cloud knew, so would the mists. Beginning with the twilight hours and lasting until the dawn burnt it away with the dark of the morning, a dense, wet fog blanketed the town from earth to sky. Entering it made it impossible to see more than a metre in any direction, and if it were very thick, even a hand raised in front of your face took on a faint, blurry outline, as if your eyes were filled with water. Despite this, the night and early morning were his favourite parts of the day. There were few villagers wandering outside at these times, and he knew the village well enough that even sightlessness couldn’t impede him. With his lessons ending in the early afternoon and his mother working from the early morning until late, he had had ample time to explore, and owing to this, he had already traced every inch of Nibelheim’s lazily winding roads and run through each field of corn and between the leaves of every slumping dragonfruit tree.

Seven-hundred steps from the doorway was the well in the original centre of the town, and six-hundred beyond that was the main road that snaked beyond the yellowed wooden fence, past the hilly pastures, and downward to whole other towns he’d never been. Four-thousand steps to the right of the main road, and all along that worn footpath, were the paddies, cut deep into the hills and overlooked by tall, brown observation facilities. During the fall, as it was now, the hills burst with yellow-gold rice ears, but he found them much more interesting in the summer and spring. During the warm months, he could spend hours peering through the water at the fish cultures as striders skated across the surface, schools of perch and whitefish darted curiously around his knees, and the fat, long carp eyed him warily from between the reeds. At the bottom, shy prawn and shield shrimp crept between his toes, kicking up mud to disguise themselves amongst the tadpoles and the weeds. Not far off was a small pond notorious amongst the village children for its box turtles, water scorpions, and giant water bugs. Standing at its edge with waxed yarn and bits of dried herring, it was possible to bait crayfish, and in the summer months, during holidays, the children would return home after an afternoon with buckets full of them.

He trotted along, idly swinging his mother’s and his interlocked hands. From somewhere ahead, he heard the shriek of young ibises, and he imagined a flock of them bursting from the trees and into the sky as they often did, a sudden splash of pink across a blue canvas. The west side of the village was shaded with fruiting trees, the results of what was mostly an effort to liven up the old large schoolhouse that sat a short ways behind the general store. According to his mother, it was an effort that been made just before he was born, but the only thing it had succeeded in doing, she claimed, was attracting birds. Most of the time you could catch skylarks, turtle doves, and bulbuls crouching in the eaves of houses, wheeling through the sky, or shouting from rooftops. Large black ravens played through the mists and atop the fog nets in the morning, and oftentimes, as he remembered, an ibis or two would stumble through the school’s playground on its way to hunt carp in the rice paddies.

“Look at that one,” his mother said, pointing to a large dove as the general store came in sight. “I bet it eats more than you.” She stopped short in front of the heavy glass door. “Wait here for me all right? Just be a sec.” Cloud nodded obediently, pulling himself onto one of the stone benches beneath the store’s pavilion. He didn’t like the building much anyway. The air always smelled somehow waxy and dry, and worse, Mr Greene was sure to be behind the counter. Mr Greene never seemed to pay Cloud much attention whenever he entered the store with his mother, but looking at him made Cloud nervous. Mr Greene had small, watery eyes, and even though he wasn’t old, he was always sort of bent over in a way that reminded Cloud of a tree branch that had been twisted in the wind. Worst of all were his long, furry fingers. They reminded Cloud of spaghetti noodles. And they were always wobbling and darting around so quickly that Cloud couldn’t help but try to count them over and over to make sure there were the right number. First they were on counter, then in the air, then on his mother’s shoulder, at her elbow, then forearm, her wrist, then in the air again. The attempt always gave him a headache, and each time they left the store he would leave feeling somewhat sick and dizzy. He kicked his legs back and forth, staring at the large billboard advertising the store’s reduced price fresh fruit.

PUT A MALUS IN YOUR MAW

He squinted at the sign. He had never had any idea what this meant, but he often found himself having staring contests with the image of a smiling chocobo holding an apple. He’d had a straight losing streak thus far, and the way that its eyes seemed to follow you wherever you went, always started an uneasy churn in his stomach that would make him reach for his mother’s hand. He turned away, his gaze beginning to wander as he heard his mother exit with the chime of the glass door. She knelt in front of him, unscrewing the caps of three small bottles of oil and mixing their contents into a plastic applicator. Immediately, the smell of citrus and sandalwood—and the faint odour of flowers—began to perfume the air. She dabbed several large droplets of the mixture into her hands, rubbing them together and massaging them across his neck, legs, and arms before doing the same for herself. “Mosquitoes,” she explained, though he was familiar with this ritual already. She packaged the bottles into the duffel bag and offered him her empty hand. Heading to the north now, he could feel excitement begin to bubble in his chest again.

Hardly anyone frequented the north of the town except on business. In fact, Nibelheim seemed to be split into two separate categories: the older buildings, and the ones that had been built more recently. Walking past the houses in the south, you would often hear the static-y sound of radio talk show hosts and flushing toilets drift over the low stone walls. Tricycles and plastic swords and chocobo dolls lay strewn amongst bursts of green shrubbery and behind screens of towels and sheets hanging from clothes-drying poles that protruded into the garden over. One house in particular had a large basketball hoop that attracted all the boys in the neighbourhood, and a ceramic outdoor dining table surrounded by more than a dozen faded yellow lawn chairs that had been worn down by many a summertime cookout. The newer buildings, by contrast, showed hardly any sign of wear at all. Everyone who went in or came out of them wore clean, white coats and moved like they had somewhere to be, and like the people, the buildings themselves were tall, neat structures untouched by even a speck of dirt. Several rows of these identical buildings budded from the manicured grounds like white sprouts, varied only by their number of blue-tinted windows. But what differentiated them the most were the shocks of foliage on their roofs, stark against the white sheet walls. Hanging grasses, vines, shrubs, and even whole trees jutted in thick green clusters towards the sunlight. In school, they had been told that these were called “sod roofs,” but looking at the tall, rambling buildings, alive but dormant, he imagined them as the backs of giant, sleeping tortoises dreaming in the sun.

Beyond this, the path began to narrow. As they picked their way through the densening trees, the face of Mount Nibel, unmistakable from any anywhere in the village, loomed over them.

No one else dared enter these forests.

Every day, the sun sank between behind the mountains, a round orange disk encased between two peaks. It had long been said that spirits travelled over the mountains during their journey to the north of the planet, and it was believed that Nibel was the door to transmigration. When twilight fell, at a certain hour between day and dusk, this mountainous corridor became a passage for deceased souls on their way to the other world. As if in confirmation, even when the sun burnt way the fog in the village, the peaks and forest of Nibel often remained shrouded in mist. The jungle never withered with the seasons, and even in the deepest of winters, snow never fell on the mountains. His mother claimed that this was because they were warmed by the breath of an enormous guardian dragon twined around its summits, whose roar sounded like the gong of a distant bell. Each time he thought of this, he would remember a story about a horrible storm that he had overhead teachers whispering about years earlier. Long before he had been born, Nibelheim was hit by a torrential downpour that ripped the crops out of the earth, crushed abandoned barnhouses, and flooded the rice paddies. While the earth was wrapped in darkness, a flash of lightning tore through the sky and illuminated what many would later agree was a golden-scaled dragon swimming through the rifts between the clouds.

Now the declining sun came in dappled through the tree branches, the yellowed sky showing through the gaps between them. Crickets, frogs, and evening birds had begun their late chorus, and beneath this he could hear the powerful rush of the river like a monster deep below. This path was familiar to them. Deeper into the forest was a great, thick tree with gnarled roots that poked through the ground. It was surrounded by a grove of tall trees with high fruit that his mother sometimes picked using only a long cloth. Beyond even that was a wild bamboo thicket that gave way to a lake so wide that it was impossible to see the other shore. But staring at the bell-shaped flowers along the trail, Cloud knew they were headed for a clearing not far from mouth of the forest, a place where the river calmed and snaked lazily through the trees. As they broke through the last, waxy wall of underbrush, his mother released his hand. From the clearing, all was obscured by the green opacity of the jungle except a circle of colossal, oblong boulders standing farther up the mountain like colossal tombstones. He sat near the edge of the river, watching groups of minnows dart between the rocks in the shallows.

“Hey, Mama?”

“Uh-huh?” His mother had produced the hotplate from her bag and was staring at it intently as she gently prodded batteries into its dock.

“Where does the river come from?”

She flipped the hotplate over, cranking the knob and emptying the contents of a package into a small pan she’d produced from her duffel. “It comes from a valley that’s really far past the mountains.”

A round black pebble with a single silver stripe sat in the shallow bed of the river. Cloud reached for it, drying it on the leg of his shorts. “Then where does the water in the valley come from?” he asked.

“I guess it comes down from the clouds in the sky?”

“So where do the clouds in the sky come from?”

His mother paused, considering this for a moment. The aroma of noodles and frying meat had begun to cut through the haze of soil and water. “You sure ask a heck of a lotta questions, don’t you,” she teased, reaching over to rub a bit of earth from his cheek.

“But if they all come from the same place,” Cloud continued slowly, “Does that mean seas, rivers, rain, and the sky are all the same thing?”

For many moments, there was silence. Even the gurgle of the river and the incessant calls of the birds seemed muffled. Finally, his mother began to move again. Handing him a plastic fork, she parcelled out the contents of the pan into two bowls she retrieved from the duffel. She packed a small ash tray with brown paper, dropped what looked like a large, white chunk of white wax into it, and touched a lit match to the paper. “Mosquitoes,” she said again to no one in particular. After another quiet few seconds, she answered. “I guess you could think of them as thoughts.”

“Thoughts?” echoed Cloud, bewildered.

“Well, not all water is water, you know,” she whispered conspiratorially. “Some people say that there’s a type of creature that takes the shape of water. At least, it’s a clear, colourless liquid, but it’s alive. It lives in the bottoms of old water veins, and sometimes even in lakes or wells. Supposedly, if a person keeps drinking it, they’ll become a cloud and float away.” Her voice dropped lower, a ghost of a smile at her lips. “And if that happens, they can only come back to earth when it’s cool enough for them to condense, and in certain other places where the veil is weakest. They say that’s how water spirits are created.”

“Are the mists in the forest…people?”

“They might be.” But he could see her face struggling not to crease into a grin.

He watched her eyes suddenly dart up the mountain face and followed her pointing index finger.

“Look. The old moss rock has fallen.” Cloud stared for a moment, realising that the largest boulder, which had stood higher than the others and in the centre of the circle, had tumbled into a bed of kudzu. Squinting, he could see that a long thin fissure opened it from end to end.

“Is it dead?”

She laughed. “No, silly, it can’t die.” She smiled with a knowing paused. “It’s made of bone,” she added.

“Bone?”

Purposefully, she speared a snow pea and brought it slowly to her mouth. Then she took a long, deep breath. This he also recognised. Oftentimes when they came to this clearing, they would while away hours weaving fairy tales together to pass the time. Most of his stories were frightening, elaborate, and pointless, but his mother’s were three times as crazy. Children in her stories all had bamboo battle kites and eagle feather wings so that they could fly anywhere they wanted to go, and they befriended ancient, talking beasts who lived beneath the darkness of the ocean’s waters and could slip between the streams of time. His favourite story was about a girl named Aki who had been born in the lunar sea, and who lived—along with the rest of her people—atop a colossal, all-white moonlight butterfly that circled the moon like its tinier brethren circled the flames of a fire. When the sun rose, the enormous creature landed on the earth to sleep amongst the trees of a hidden, ancient forest, and its residents would wander beneath the early sunlight eating sweet fruits. The people of the moon wore robes of soft, shimmering, reflective moth silk, and when the sun rose high in the sky, they shone such a brilliant gold that when Aki stepped on the ground, flowers grew beneath her feet, and plants turned away from the sky to face her. When she slept, it was in a secret place atop blue waters, enfolded within the iridescent vortex of the petals of a giant lotus flower.

Bringing another pea to her mouth and chewing it deliberately, she began. “The entire known universe rocks suspended in a thick, granite mortar which sways gently on the back of an immense blue-green elephant. And the elephant’s leathery feet are carefully balanced atop the peaks of ten mountains of jade which arise from a boundless and barren quagmire of shifting, fetid, black mud, and the quagmire is balanced perilously on top the leaves of a tall, thin acacia tree which grows from the nostril of an immense blood-coloured bull with one thousand eyes that exhales flames the colour of the midnight sky, and the bull’s hooves are firmly planted on a single mote of dust which floats in the eye of Bahamut like a grain of sand.”

She paused.

“No one has ever seen Bahamut. Some think it’s a dragon. Some think it’s a whale. All we know is that the lonely Bahamut drifts through time and space with everything and all of us floating in a single tear in his eye.”

He leaned forwards as she continued, transfixed.

“Now, in the age of ancients, the universe was unformed, a single light shrouded by fog—a grey blanket of inky darkness and everlasting cold. As the light spread and grew stronger, terrible monsters began to emerge—”

“Where did they come from?”

“Shh. Don’t interrupt. They came from the shadows cast by the light. World devourers with stone skin who travelled across the cosmos from planet to planet, eating stars and destroying everything in their wake.”

“And then?” Cloud pressed, breathless.

“And then from the light they came, and channelled its powers as theirs to claim. Hades, Scion of the Dark; Shiva the Mother of Entropy and her twin, Ifrit, Master of Chaos; Artorias, Lord of War, and his twelve faithful knights; and Ramuh, the Emperor of All Light, not easily forgotten. With the strength of Light, they challenged the Devourers. Ramuh’s mighty bolts peeled apart their stone flesh. The siblings weaved great storms of fire and ice. Artorias led an unending onslaught, and Hades betrayed his own, unleashing a miasma of death and disease. Soon, the Light Eaters were almost no more. But before the final blows could be struck, Ifrit was cast out into space. Fearing for her brother, Shiva wandered deep into the abyss of the cosmos where she was adrift for thousands of years. For thousands of years more, she slept. And when she woke up again in the middle of the void, she was ravenous.”

“What does ‘ravenous’ mean?”

“Really hungry. She was so hungry that she began to eat the darkness around her. She ate and ate until the abyss was no longer a void, and then she fell asleep again. As she slept, the world began to form in her belly. Her blood turned to sea water, her skin turned into black loam, and her bones became rock. A thousand later, her brother found her drifting through space. But by then, she had already split into two. Vowing to watch over her for the rest of time, he drew her close to better keep watch. It’s said that Ifrit sleeps inside the sun even now.”

Cloud was silent for a moment. “So what happened to Shiva?”

“Chew your food. She split into her two aspects. Water, ice. Solid, liquid. The aspects became her two children: Leviathan, the Lady of All Waters and Titan. Leviathan rules all the oceans and the seas on the planet, influencing even land with rains and floods.”

“What about Titan?” She took his hand, unfurling it so that it pointed at the mountain.

“Titan slumbers inside the earth. Mountain ranges are the ridge of his backbone, the land is his skin, and earthquakes are what happens when he stretches.”

“So Shiva became two people?”

“More or less.”

“But where did the Shiva part go?”

She cocked her head at him. “What do you mean?”

“The Shiva part. Where did it go?”

His mother stared at him for a moment, eyebrows raised, before an expression of understanding flickered across her face.

“Well,” she said slowly, “there’s a river of light that flows underneath the ground.”

“Of light?”

“Yes. It flows close to the surface here. Light made of fragments—pieces—of life. Memories.”

“But memories aren’t alive.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she insisted. “A memory is a piece of life at a certain instance. So each memory is a living thing of its own. So, the river is alive. Made up of every memory of every moment that has ever existed and everything that’s ever happened. But the most powerful memories are Shiva’s. Sometimes her memories—especially the strong memories about her loved ones—bubble up to the surface and take a physical form. Forms that can project images that imitate the powers of light used long ago as she dreams of friends and the battles that she fought against her enemies.” Lapsing into silence once more, Cloud bowed his head, imagining falling into a sleep of a thousand years. The sun had finally sunk below the jagged rim of the mountains, and a blue pallor had crept across the forest. His mother nudged him softly before carefully collecting the bowls, pan, and hotplate and packing them into the duffel bag.

* * *

By the time they stepped through the door of their home, a thin fog had rolled into the streets, and a pale broth of silver moonlight glowed on walls of the village and across the arches of its shingled roofs. His mother was so exhausted that she swayed as she slowly walked to her bath, and though he’d argued that he had to watch her to make sure she didn’t fall down, she simply eyed him and said that he wouldn’t get out of a bath that easily. Still in her fuzzy pink bathrobe, she lowered herself onto the mattress pushed up against the wall in the corner. Cloud, padding around in his overalls, took the burnt pan from the stove and gingerly placed it in the sink to soak.

“You’re a good kid,” he heard his mother mumble from the shadow in the corner. Then she stretched her arms out towards him. He wrinkled his nose.  
“I’m too old,” he declared, nodding at the blue mat pushed besides hers.

“Well, I’m not,” she retorted. “I need my teddy bear.” Relenting, he crawled onto the mattress and into her arms, and was calmed by the scent of her vanilla body wash. Her chest rose and fell slowly, broken only by tired sighs.

“Mama?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Will you tell me a story?”

“It’s bedtime. Remember you’re spending the day at Mrs Lockhart’s tomorrow, and you can’t be rude by passing out as soon as you walk through the door and drooling all over her good pillows.”

“I don’t drool!”

“The stains on these sheets say differently.”

“Please?”

“Don’t make those eyes at me. I can tell you’re doing it even in the dark.” She pulled him closer and exhaled deeply, a warm gust that ruffled his hair. “What kind of story?”

“Scary.” He felt a light tug on his ear.

“Don’t be mad if you have bad dreams.” She took a long breath. “Once upon a time, there was a boy staying the night in old, creaky castle. He suspected it was haunted, so he decided to check behind all the drapes in his bedchamber. Nearly all of them simply hid chips in stone wall or were just bare, but hidden behind a deep red curtain nearest to the window and across his bed, was a corpse. The body had mostly decayed, but he could tell that it had been badly mangled and crushed into shape so that it could fit behind the narrow strip of cloth. The boy let the curtain fall back. ‘You know what,’ he said to himself. ‘Tomorrow I have to get up early, so I’m just gonna pretend I never even saw that.’ And then he went to sleep. The end.”

“Maaaamaaa.”

“What?” she asked, muffling her chuckles. “You don’t think it’s a good story?” After her laughter subsided, he began to feel her hand running through his hair. She stroked his face even more gently, featherlight caresses over his cheeks, then along his forehead and eyebrows, and finally his shut eyelids. “The owl and the kitty cat went to sea,” she murmured, her breath warm against his ear, “in a beautiful pea-green boat. They took some honey and plenty of money wrapped up in a five-gil note.” She paused, her thumb still stroking his cheek. “Cloud,” she whispered, “you awake?” He said nothing, forcing his breath to steady itself. Warmth and drowsiness had pressed up against his skin, and he struggled against real waves of sleep that threatened to overtake him. A time passed, but she still stroked his face and murmured words that he had lost the ability to understand through the fog of lethargy.

Eventually, her fingers stilled against his cheek and rubbing his eyes, he realised that she had dozed off. He rubbed his eyes, sat up, and cast a glance at her. He watched her as she slept, her hair swept carelessly across her forehead in thick strands of honey gold. Her face was painfully contorted, and the dim moonlight sent patterns of shadow skipping across the lines of her face. Her lips pursed and relaxed, now open, now closed, forming silent words. Her breath came shallow and uneven, and her eyes bulged blindly beneath their lids, like the eyes of a trout taken from the water. Her legs twitched spasmodically, as if she were being pursued. He reached to touch her face, tracing the arches of her cheekbones. Then he kissed the creases between her eyebrows, and stifled a giggle of delight when her face relaxed and her mouth stretched into a faint smile. Leaning forwards, he placed another light kiss on her temple, then laid his head on the mattress and dropped straight into sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bruh. 
> 
> Grad school out here grinding my bones. Also, I apologise in advance for this update (well I guess this isn't in advance is it?)--I'm well aware it's basically a do-nothing twenty page info/codex dump, and for that I am truly sorry (especially for myself). The setup was kind of necessary though, but I won't deny how tossed together this is...mostly because this chapter is just a load of things written six years ago (that i didn't bother editing) mashed together. Thus the weird fluctuations in narrative viewpoint and style. I truly cannot kill my darlings and that is why there are basically two different intros and they say more or less the same thing (lol). For the record, the scene before the first break takes place approximately a year before the next section--the "current" timeline. I really just wanted to toss this out there so I could get on with the next bit and not be stuck on this forever. The good news is that things will actually happen (sorta) next chapter, will be much more interesting (hopefully), and will be the #tru debut of three major characters (you can probably guess who). And I'll probably (try really hard to) have it up by this week. And I'll (probably) edit and reformat this later. Maybe. 
> 
> Also, the story Cloud's mother tells him is an FFVIIesque adaption of DS mythology, because DSIII was just released and guess (who is trash) what I've been doing instead of working or writing.
> 
> Also also: I'm aware in-game Nibel is a hideous rocky outcropping with no vegetation to be found. That's plot-relevant. ~~this is canon-compliant i swear~~


	3. Poco a Poco

WHEN SHE AWOKE THAT MORNING, she awoke with a feeling of torpid disorientation, like a diver who had unexpectedly broken through the surface of the water. Outside, the new morning hung silent, shrouded in ash grey fog that cast a heavy shadow over the room. A single flame of light, a long rectangle stretching from the low window of the parlour, warmed her face as she sat up and blinked away the night’s dreams from behind her eyelids.  
  
Through the slight blur in her vision, she could make out a shadow at the open window. It was a raven perched in the alcove, its head cocked and its large, inky eyes shifting with curiosity. Small for its species, the raven had a plumage of unusual thickness, and low on its abdomen, partially concealed, was a shrivelled, malformed extra leg. Her son had once saved this bird when he found it one morning, panicked and tangled in the fog nets. Since then, it had appeared at the window with the mists at the same time every day, and Cloud claimed that he could communicate with the creature. As her head cleared, she could hear his voice drift up through the gloom, high and childishly sweet, as he read passages from his favourite comic book to it. He sat in front of the sill with his head bent forwards, shining eyes fixed on the pages with absorption and belief. She got up as quietly as she could, careful not to disturb them. Cloud and the raven swapping literary opinions at the windowsill each morning wasn’t hurting anyone.

She retreated to the washroom, where she shrugged off her robe and bathed. Like the rest of the house, the bathroom was small and cramped. It was no more than a narrow, slanted chamber enclosed by a thin, sliding wood partition that had been retrofitted along with the basin and flush toilet. Beyond it was the kitchen—an open square interrupted only by a wood oven stove tucked into the corner—, and the modest parlour, separated by no walls and two strides from the front door. A lone, battered bureau she had dragged home from the general store surplus sat resting in the corner. Atop it was a singing bowl, its weathered bronze face gleaming weakly through the shadows. There was a small recess just beyond the window where she pushed the narrow mattress every night, and a low table where they took their meals, outfitted with rigid wooden seats and a patchy armchair. The remainder of the room was occupied by a makeshift shelf of plank and cinder blocks that was lined with books; rows and rows, spine-outward.

She pulled on her clothes and entered the kitchen, where she scoured away the scorched remnants left in the pan from the night before. Ignoring the lingering sluggishness and dull ache in her spine, she put a cup of rice of to boil, then made herself hot coffee and forced a cup into her stomach. As the rice softened into cereal, she stared up at the ceiling. The eggs, bread, oil, and bag of rice were dwindling, but she would have the opportunity to replace them after the day in Honnleath, she hoped. That they would be cheaper closer to the distribution centre seemed like a matter of course.

When the clock advanced to the hour, she stoked the stove fire. Still at the window, Cloud was no longer reading to the raven. He had produced a smooth, silver-streaked river pebble and offered it to the bird. After a moment of what seemed like consideration, the creature gently took the stone into its beak, disappeared from the sill, and returned to drop a bright yellow shell into Cloud’s hand. She turned back to the stove and stirred honey, apples, and plums into the cereal as Cloud stood up to tuck the shell into a small box hidden within the bookshelf. She sliced two apricots into thin wedges and walked to the alcove to offer one to the raven. Tentatively, almost gingerly, it took the wedge from her fingers. Then it spread its wings and flew off, apparently having seen all that it needed to for the day. A single feather, glossy and black, lay on the sill.   

She turned away from the window. “You take a bath already?” she called over to Cloud, as she divided the porridge into two bowls.  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“Brush your teeth?”

“Yes.”  
  
“Lemme smell your breath.”  
  
“ _Mama_.”  
  
She bit back a grin as he slid into a chair at the table, still clutching his comic book. His eyes flickered rapidly over his bowl, taking inventory of bobbing fruit as he mouthed numbers. This had become natural for him. He counted everything: the steps from the door to the road, the number of steps along the road, how many dishes and pieces of cutlery she washed. Anything that could be counted, he did. Once, she had joked about counting the stars in the night sky and was shocked to find that that he had taken her seriously. He had spent hours making meticulous note of the pins of light over the mountains before confusing himself and falling asleep. Perhaps it was an odd interest, but it was one that comforted him, and for this, she was grateful. Better, it seemed to help him concentrate, and to break some of the monotony of the long days that they spent apart.  
  
“By the way,” she tapped her forehead. “You did remember to finish that assignment Ms Creedy wanted, right?”  
  
“Yes,” he answered around a mouthful. He made a face. “It took forever.”  
  
“Wasn’t it just supposed to be a paragraph about what you thought of the book you read?”  
  
“Yeah. But I don’t like stuff like that.”  
  
Her mouth twitched. “Because there’s no numbers?”

He twirled his spoon between his fingers. “I don’t get it. How do you know what the right answer’s supposed to be?” At this, she laughed. His mathematical talent had actually emerged out of extreme difficulty. When he’d entered school at five, he hadn’t been able to count past two: her and himself.

“Cloud is making progress with his reading, but he isn’t capable of grasping natural numbers,” said an early report card. “He doesn’t understand the _countability_ of chips, rods, blocks, and other solid objects. For this reason, I will not recommend that he advances to year two.” This had left her speechless. In her mind, she’d birthed a brilliant child and she took the note as both a slight and a challenge.

“Counting?” she’d asked when she could speak again. His face began to crumble and she hastily backtracked. “Hey, c’mon. Don’t listen to this stuff. I’m looking at it, it doesn’t make sense. I understand all the letters, but together? Nah, it’s gibberish, it’s nothing, it’s alphabet friggin’ soup.” She sat down, drawing him into her lap. “It’s these bumpkin teachers. _I’ll_ teach you how to count.”

And so, she’d begun to make a game out of keeping track of things. When she made him snacks, they’d count orange slices and chunks of apple. At dinner time, she’d convinced him that a specific number of rice grains and bean sprouts would make a meal more delicious. From going on treasure hunts for honeysuckle, he learned how to count in twos, and she’d take him up to the river and its ancient trees so they could make flower bracelets and count blades of grass together until they had dry throats and raspy voices.

By his seventh birthday, he’d memorised the multiplication tables to thirty-times-thirty. Two months after that, he could recite the table of squares and cubes so quickly that they blended together into a chant that sounded like an incantation: “Oneeighttwentysevensixtyfouronetwentyfivetwosixteenththreefortythree…”  

As he recited, she’d starch her aprons and uniform, or she’d stand in the kitchen pretending to conduct him with a spatula. Each time the flash of metal came onto the downbeat, he was supposed to stress a syllable. “One, eight, twenty- _four_. _Pronounce._ ”

When they’d finished, Cloud jumped out of his chair and collected the bowls before she could protest. After carefully positioning the step stool at the kitchen sink, he washed and stacked the dishes and set the pot to soak.  
  
“Shoes,” she called after him, as she pulled on her own. Moments later, he reappeared with his little blue knapsack, offering it to her to make sure he had forgotten nothing. As she rummaged through the bag, she could see his face tilt up towards her from in the corner of your eyes. She paused and cast a glance at him.  
  
“What?”  
  
He opened his mouth, then hesitated for a moment, as if considering how best to construct his next words. His delicate brow creased with of a sculptor regarding a block of marble before the first bite of the chisel.  
  
“Can I—” He shook his head and tried again. “Do you think I could get some more books soon?”  
  
She tightened the cap on a bottle of water then placed it back in the bag. Then she pulled out and refolded his pyjamas with deft efficiency, unbothered by the fact that Cloud had apparently packed a week’s worth of socks for a single night. She put his clothing back in the knapsack, the metal button clasp closing with a soft click.  
  
“I’ll keep it in mind.”  
  
“Can I read yours?” he asked hopefully.  
  
She wet her thumb and rubbed a bit of dried toothpaste from his chin. “You can try, but I don’t think you’d like them.”

“Not even that one?”

She turned to follow the line of his finger. Atop the makeshift shelf was a, thick-paged book bound in yellow-brown leather. Authorless and untitled, over the years its rough face had been had been warped and discoloured where reverent fingertips had worn it smooth. The pages were a sculpture of folds, and a long crease split its spine. Oftentimes, she would curl up in the sunlight of the window to read this book. Or she would fall asleep in her old armchair to rainclouds and the roll of thunder with it clutched to her chest.  
  
“It wouldn’t interest you.”

“Why not?”

“I like both my coffee and my literature dark and extremely bitter.” She paused and placed her hands on her hips, brow furrowed. “And your shoes are on the wrong feet.”  
  
Cloud peered at his toes. For a long moment he stared down in confusion before looking back at her.  
  
“These are the only feet I have.”  
  
She pressed her lips together to keep from laughing. “That’s fair,” she admitted. Kneeling down and switching his trainers, she began to readjust his socks. “Remember, I’m gonna be gone for the whole night, so you have to be on your best behaviour, okay?”  
  
“Okay.”  
  
“And be nice to Tifa, okay?”  
  
“Okay.” He lapsed into silence as she pulled a light jumper over his head and attempted to smooth down the cowlicks erupting in every direction. “Is it…a mutation?” he asked finally.  
  
“What?”  
  
“Tifa.”  
  
She stopped, eyeing the new issue of _Mind Blow_ still rolled up in the tiny fist of his left hand.

“Really? You’re gonna run around calling little girls ‘mutants’ now? That’s the hill you’re gonna die on?”

“ _Die_?”

“It’s just an expression.”

“But people don’t usually have red eyes…do they?”

“I think the word you’re looking for is ‘carnelian,’” she corrected. “Besides, you don’t think they’re pretty?”

“They’re kinda weird—”

“Don’t lie.” She pulled his ear. “And you better not say that to her.” Pinching his cheek, she opened the door and led him outside into the grey of the morning.  
  
The Lockhart house was no more than a few steps from their own, but the drifting Nibelheim mists obscured it, created the illusion of a sudden peak materialising in the dim morning, like a castle hidden in the clouds. She knocked once. Twice. As she brought her hand up a third time, the heavy oak door creaked open to reveal a man’s chest. For a moment the man stared somewhere over her head, then gazed downward at her as if he hadn’t expected her there.

“Anju.”  
  
She let her hand fall. “Morning, John.”  
  
He nodded. “Jia will be down soon.”  
  
He motioned them inside, shutting the door after them as Anju steadied Cloud and removed their shoes. With a small nod, John led them towards the living room with long strides. Watching this movement—his shoulders near still and his back straight as if he had a steel rod in it—Anju couldn’t help but imagine metal pistons jerking and gears grinding together beneath a skeuomorphic facsimile of flesh. He seemed an exquisite machine designed for power and efficiency.  
  
Lockhart was a mountain of a man, broad-chested and with wide shoulders that sloped downward with great dignity. He had a head of thick black hair, with equally dark and impenetrable eyebrows that flowed across the heavy ridge of his forehead in two immaculate lines. They were the first thing one noticed when looking into his face, and they contrasted strikingly with his eyes, which were heavy-lidded and set so deeply in his head that they were shrouded in a seemingly permanent half-shadow that made it difficult to determine the direction of his gaze. Clean-shaven, the expanse of his face bore no scars or blemishes, and an aquiline nose hung resolutely in its centre over an implacable mouth. There was a synergy to these features. They complimented one another, producing a striking vision of serenity and intelligence.  
  
Yet there was something inscrutable about this man John. It was impossible to tell from the tone of his voice and the expression on his face what it was that he was feeling or thinking. Anju had not ever known him to indulge in egotistical displays of intellect, but it was obvious to anyone that mentally he was very quick, and had a repertoire of knowledge both far-reaching and deep. Rarely did he speak at length, and he seemed to abhor long-winded explanation. When compelled, he could present his opinions rationally and concisely. But it was with a meticulousness that inspired the suspicion that he had his own internal sense of reason, and reached his own conclusions long before considering any outside perspective.  
  
As they entered the living room, he gestured at a red leather loveseat and waited until they were seated before lowering himself into the facing easy chair. Between them was a low coffee table on which sat a platter of pastries and a pot of tea, still visibly hot.

They drank the tea in silence.  
  
Anju wrapped her fingers around her teacup, waiting for her eyes to adjust. Few buildings in Nibelheim—save the inn, the laboratories, and the general store—had dedicated electrical power or light not drawn from gas lamps or battery appliances, but the Lockharts rarely used even these. Instead, they preferred candles and the daylight that filtered through the drapes. This, of course, was for Tifa’s benefit. She had been born with sensitive eyes, a condition that Jia claimed had occasionally manifested throughout the generations of her family. Though the girl’s eyes eventually strengthened, the lighting did not, and so always the house was aglow with soft yellow light, like a separate dimension perpetually locked in an ethereal dawn. When night fell, so did absolute darkness.  
  
But it was a gracious space, with high ceilings, sprawling walnut floors, and tall, thick-paned windows that allowed sun to pass through in long, gentle rays where the air was freckled with dust. There were a few pieces of mahogany furniture that fit neatly into the wide halls and spacious rooms; a large bookcase lined with thick tomes and a single inkstone packed carefully away in a maple box; long end tables dotted with porcelain censers, their smoke curling into the air. Time seemed to have its own special way of flowing here, and whenever she came, Anju felt she was in another world. The air was heavy, redolent with the fragrance of incense and dates. From somewhere above came the muffled melody of a piano.

John sat in front of her as though he’d been carved from stone, his face obscured by a shimmering wall of steam. She could feel his gaze on her—or somewhere past her—not quite penetrating, but all-encompassing, as if his eyes were seeing everything, narrowing and widening like the aperture of a camera. Beside her, Anju could feel Cloud begin to fidget with the zipper of his bag. She stared down at her tea. A bobbing leaf dissipated her reflection in the glittering surface.    
  
John’s eyes seemed to shutter, then suddenly refocus. He shook his head.  
  
“Sorry, sorry,” he apologised. He passed a hand over his face, briefly rubbing at his temples. Then his eyes snapped to Cloud, as if he were noticing him for the first time. “Good morning, Cloud.”

Cloud hid his face in her arm. He returned the greeting, but he did so carefully, breathing heavily and sounding out each word so slowly that Anju didn’t see how he remembered what he’d said. John stared at him with raised eyebrows before looking back to her.

“You know, if you paid him less attention, he might not feel the need to fly to you all the time.”

“I don’t think so.”

“How’s that? Don’t you think he should be around other kids his age? He should be enrolled in school with the rest of them.”

Anju found herself wrapping her arm around Cloud, guarding him. Fragile-looking and delicately boned, his round cheeks flushed rose when he was excited, his brows were as sharply defined and arched as a woman’s, and his wide eyes, still bright with childish sincerity, were framed by long lashes. He had taken strongly after her, and in school the boys had ceaselessly tormented him about how pretty he was—the thick lashes and the rosebud mouth, the smooth skin, his narrow wrists. On the playground they imitated a woman’s walk and ridiculed his shapely eyebrows and love of mathematics. Already painfully withdrawn by nature, he seemed confused and alarmed by the idea of quarrelling, and fell silent and sad in conflict. He had spent his days erupting into soundless tears as they feigned sickness from the scent of lavender and lemongrass on his skin.

“You don’t know how they are. The other children make fun of him.”

Mr Lockhart shook his head. “I wasn’t so coddled by my mother.” He was about to say something more when Jia appeared at the foot of the stairs to scold him.

“John!” She called, crossing into the room. “Stop harassing them.” Mr Lockhart turned to her with a bewildered expression.

“I wasn’t. I was just—” he cut himself off with a vague smile when he realised that his wife had dismissed him with a roll of her eyes and was no longer listening.  
  
Anju’s eyes followed the movement of Jia’s sheer green robe as she chastised her husband. Two more different people could not be imagined. While John’s obsidian eyes and studied calm conveyed stoicism and decorum, Jia’s generous smile and open gaze communicated no such thing. While John kept a proprietous reserve, Jia had no propriety to speak of. She favoured roots and soil, the physical act of turning the earth. She liked to dig deep into the dirt, arranging sprouts and stones into “miniature worlds.” She had an insatiable sweet tooth, and spent her free time baking and teasing her husband—and anyone who would listen—with outlandish superstitions that she swore she believed in. Still, they loved each with a ferocity that reassured.  
  
It comforted and haunted her to see the way they loved each other.

Jia turned towards Cloud, cracking a smile that made her eyes nearly disappear. Cloud stared back at her. He was still gripping Anju’s arm, but looking at Jia, he couldn’t help but smile a little himself. She knelt and offered open arms to him. Slowly, timidly, he slid out of the loveseat to be enveloped in a bear hug. After a long moment, she pulled away from him and reached for the platter on the coffee table. She popped one of the sweets into her mouth.  
  
“They’re walnuts and dates,” she explained to him around a mouthful. “I know they’re your favourite.” She handed him the tray. “Can you take these up to Tifa? The rest of her cronies are grounded right now and she can’t go outside, so I’ll make you a deal. If you distract her for me, you can eat as many as you want. Okay?” She paused for a moment. “Just try not to eat them all at once,” she teased.  
  
Cloud nodded slightly, taking the pastries from her and shouldering his knapsack. He took a step towards the staircase, but hesitated before turning around.  
  
“The window is open,” he said quietly.  
  
Jia cocked her head. “I know. There’s a breeze coming in.”  
  
“The window is open,” he repeated, a little louder.  
  
Anju started to stand and intervene, but sat back down when Jia motioned her away with a wave of her hand.  
  
“Do you want the window closed or are you saying something else?” Jia asked.  
  
“Something else.”  
  
“Are you worried that something might happen or something else?”  
  
“Worried.”  
  
“Are you worried about something will come in, or something outside?”  
  
“Rain.”  
  
“We’ll close the window before it rains.” Then she added, “And your mom and I will be driving to town on the east road with one of the delivery vans, so you don’t have to worry about the mudslides. Is that okay, or is there still a problem?”  
  
“Okay.” He cast a glance at Anju before giving Jia a quick, one-armed hug and disappearing up the stairs.  
  
Jia rose to her feet, still staring up after him and hiding smile behind her hand. She looked to Anju. “He’s so cute.” She turned back to John. “And you,” she said, prodding him in the temple. “Mind your own business.”  
  
John shrugged non-committedly back at her.  
  
“So you’re sure you’re up to watching both of them for the night?” Jia asked him.  
  
“I only look useless,” he assured drily.

With a stifled laugh, Jia motioned at the back door, then at Anju, who left John in his easy chair.  She trailed behind Jia in silence, focusing on the pendulous sway of her braids. Jia’s hair had the blackness and lustre of fresh lacquer. Viewed from behind, it was a dark waterfall ascending from her calves to her crown. The two intricate plaits seemed to dissolve into the creamy white plane of her nape, leaving flyaway strands that caressed her shoulders, and whose dark sheen contrasted against her skin—like a snow-capped mountaintop at first obscured, then revealed by a drifting veil of storm clouds. Oftentimes, as with now, Anju would find herself stunned by the full force of feminine grace—overwhelming flashes of splendour that sent her wits reeling.  
   
They exited through the door and circled around to the side of the house. Between their homes was a raised wooden pergola with a deep bed of black loam that had been carried down from the mountains. Baskets of fern and sweetgrass hung from the roof, honeysuckle and trumpet vines twined up its pillars, and a long pine bench sat adrift in a sea of autumn blossoms. A heavy blanket of wisteria swept low from the canopy. The pergola was a project of Jia’s. Though she had initially used it and its accompanying coldframe to nurse laboratory cultivars, it had quickly become a hobby, an outward expression of inward soul that burst forward in bright bloom. Tifa had been immediately bored by the idea of gardening, and while Cloud would help dutifully if asked, his constant fidgeting betrayed his distraction. And so it had become a ritual for just the two of them, one that paid dividends throughout the year. In the fall it was a flash of gold, and when spring came, the air was fragrant with the scent of life. At night, it was cast in an ethereal glow, awash with moonlight.

  
Jia paused beneath the pergola and leaned against one of its pillars, her hand coming up to her forehead and her face twisted into a grimace. Anju stopped beside her.

“You okay?” she asked.  
  
Jia waved her away with a vague movement of her fingers. “It’s just a headache. I’ve been getting them a lot lately.” She moved to take off her robe, and Anju watched the arc of her wrists, the elegant lines of her arms as they vanished into her sleeves. She turned back to Anju. “Actually,” she said, “Tifa is the one I’m worried about.”  
  
Anju considered this carefully, trying to read the effortless smile on her friend’s face. “You mean because—”  
  
“Because her and night-time are a dangerous combination lately.” Jia’s voice was light and airy. “I guess it wouldn’t be so bad if I could just get her to stay in bed at night.”  
  
“She’s sleepwalking?”  
  
“No, she just—she wakes up at night and wanders the halls. We even found her outside a couple days ago.” Jia gave a soft laugh. “Really, it’s strange. I did the same thing when I was a kid. My parents finally had to put a lock on my door after I fell into a well.” Seeing Anju’s expression, she chuckled again. “It was a shallow well,” she added. “And it was dry already.” She handed Anju a pair of work gloves and motioned towards the cold frame. “Anyway, I wanted to show you something.”  
  
Anju stood motionless for a while, feeling the dense earth through the thin soles of her shoes and blinking against the thinning fog. The sky was a dim smear of grey, and far in the distance, the mountains were silent shadows on the horizon. The village seemed quieter than usual. She held her breath and listened, but she couldn’t hear the cries of the ibises or any street noises. On days like this, she thought, the mists probably absorbed all the sounds from the surface of the earth. Briefly she was struck by the odd sensation that they were the only two people in this world, that when no one was looking, they had drifted into a realm between dimensions.  
  
She moved beside Jia and watched as she slowly unlatched the lid of the coldframe. Jia still preferred to write using inkwells, a sentimental pretence that she affected in honour of mother, who taught her calligraphy. The faint inkstains of her last letter, washed brown by soap, were the only blemishes marring her iridescent nails and slender fingertips. Anju allowed her eyes to drift upward, cautiously searching Jia’s face for signs of wear. But Jia was half-turned away, focused instead on the young seedlings budding from the soil.  
  
“Look,” she breathed. “Batch A are actually growing.”  
  
Anju followed the line of her finger. For a moment she stared at the tiny bulbs, fragile and green, pushing their way towards light.  
  
“So—wait,” she began. “that ‘important thing’ we’re picking up from Honnleath is—”  
  
“You have to be there,” Jia interrupted. Her voice was suddenly bright and mischievous with repressed laughter. “If you’re taking care of a cultivar, you have to welcome them in person. Or they’ll be sad. And when plants are unhappy, they don’t grow well. And then they die.” Gently, she shut the lid of the cold frame, then pulled on a pair of gloves and began to prune the wisteria.  
  
Anju stared after her, knowing better than to challenge this. She leaned back against the cold frame and folded her arms against her chest.  
  
“Not that I’m one to argue with the plants,” she began, “but you don’t get tired of this?”  
  
Jia paused mid-motion, her shears hovering around a brown tangle of cutting. She looked back at Anju, incredulous. “No. Do you?”  
  
“No, but I’m not the one who spends hours in a greenhouse every day.”  
  
Jia turned back to the wisteria with a roll of her eyes. “That’s work. This is pleasure.”  
  
Taking up a pair of shears, Anju began to cut at the other end of the pergola. Engineers by trade, Jia and John worked in the laboratories at the north side of town. Though Jia had specialised in biochemical engineering, and John in mechanical, both had come to Nibelheim with a small offshoot of a research collective headed by a woman named Deepa Bhattacharyya. Originally based in the collective’s compound in Midgar, the two had taken the opportunity to move when Jia had fallen pregnant. Midgar, as Jia had later explained, was no place to raise a child.  
  
“Speaking of work,” Anju called, “how’s it going?” She heard a huff in reply from the other side of the pergola.  
  
“It’s…going.”  
  
She chuckled. “What happened? Last time I asked, you said you’d been right.”  
  
Jia moved closer to Anju, grumbling something under her breath. “I was right about bio-electrochemical systems for electric power generation. That was the subject of my thesis. You _can_ harness bioelectricity, and you can do it without harvesting the plant or harming it with some type of mediator. The thing with the microbial fuel cell idea—it works, but it’s modular, and we haven’t been able to make it scalable.” She sighed, massaging her eyes before continuing. “We have a virtually unlimited supply of putrefaciens from the water treatment system, but we only manage to generate enough to power a closed system for the labs. And only beneath a certain threshold, which means fewer operations in parallel, and fewer assays in general. As for John and his team, they haven’t been able to figure out how to adapt his microhydro model into realistic plans for penstock, or get it to produce more than forty kilowatts. He and Lee think we can combine the water system and the fuel cells into a bioreactor, but the best we could hope for from that is four watts per kilogram of organic material.” She scowled. “It would still be modular. And the cost of it would just be…astronomical. Microfabricated sensors, use of activated carbon, gold wires, copper wires, carbon cloth…even for an early LCA, the assessment isn’t exactly good. Or even feasible. We’ve been tossing around ideas for a phototrophic system, but I think our best bet is developing something tubular that can be drilled into root zones. We’re prototyping with rice right now, so if we can scale it, the paddies won’t just be aquaponics. They’ll be power too.” She turned to face Anju as if waiting for guidance.

Anju stared back with raised eyebrows. “Not that my opinion means anything,” she began drily, “but I think what all of you have done with the plumbing system is pretty amazing already. I mean, when I was a kid, we didn’t have running water unless you ran and got it.”  
  
A smile appeared on Jia’s face, then quickly disappeared as she winced and cradled her head. “Ohhh, don’t make me laugh,” she moaned. She blinked slowly, once, twice, then began to speak again. “Right now, using just one hundred square metres of rice we can…make some LEDs come on.”

Anju bit her lip to keep from chuckling at how the other woman’s voice had sheepishly trailed off like a guilty child’s. “So this means that I might even get to stop buying batteries for my can opener.”

Jia’s lips twitched. “I’d thought you’d like that. It’s just that using the paddies means engineering new cultivars, and—” She paused. “Actually no, did I tell you Deepa is taking us public? She says ‘ventures meant to improve the commons should be open to the commons for common benefit.’”

“So what, no arguing with the bosslady?”

“Even if I wanted to, it’s way too late. The IPO is next month. And it’s not that I want to argue. I understand her reasoning; I even agree with it. We need financing—sponsors. It’s not like we’re going to get subsidies, and the whole point of starting the spin-off company was so we could find salable applications for the tech. Fact is, there’s a limit to what one independently wealthy woman can do. But public trading does mean ‘public.’ There’s an element of control lost when a project is open to anyone with money.” There was a momentary quiet as she set down her shears and began to transplant a batch of sweetgrass. “Do you remember the 707 Amendment?”

Vaguely, Anju recalled the details of a trade resolution passed by the United Congress of Nations. Controversial from its very introduction, it was accused of favouring wealthy countries, and had been vociferously resisted by dissidents. Most Akogi states attempted to reject at least half its stipulations, and Wutai—only newly entered into the organisation—had refused to recognise the resolution wholesale and withdrawn from the Congress altogether.

“Not really,” she confessed. “All I remember is that it supposedly settled the whole ‘currency war’ dispute after the union made the gil the standard exchange.”

Jia nodded. “But not in the autonomous zones. It’s not something that most people behind this border would have to worry about, but there was a clause in there called Special 602, and another Super 604 subclause.” She again stopped briefly to rub her brow with the back of a wrist. “They were pushed through by commerce ministries and are the legal grounds for the sanction of any country not creating investment opportunities for multinationals with an SI designation.”  
  
Anju looked her in the eye. For once, Jia’s own eyes were neutral, completely free of any sort of expression. She was leaving herself room to go any direction with this.  
  
“About four years ago, it was used to force the location of a major rufium-44 extraction plant in Yeelen without so much as an EIA. It was a mess. The people said no. The local government said no. The Federal Ministry of Development said no. But apparently there was a visit from some trade representatives. They threatened to apply the 602, and sure enough, by the next month, the greenlight was there. Her hands came to rest as she finished repotting the last container. “The 602 is also particularly related to intellectual property rights. What it requires is that every country in the world adopt IPR legislation of the kind in the east. And it’s not just common commodities either. It’s genes and species. There are even patents for embryo transfer and human cell lines. You might not be familiar with ProGen-E Genomics, but it’s a subsidiary of the SEPC, and it has a broad species patent on soya. And on cotton. And on rice. Meaning any modification to soybeans by anyone, anywhere in the world—on cotton, on rice—they pay royalties to ProGen-E. It would be possible to file a claim of ownership per trait rights on any derived research or publicly traded commodity. The only way to avoid co-option by derivation laws is to avoid the commodity market, and to only negotiate through the disputed autonomous zones or other places, like Wutai, where 602 is already being technically enforced on the product through import sanctions. It’s chancy for a variety of reasons. And we get our rice from Xinzhou.”

Anju kept her eyes fixed on a rosebud, unsure she had fully comprehended what she’d just heard. When she had finished her section of wisteria, she stowed her shears, and removed her gloves. She retired to the wooden bench, watching the first thin rays of pale sunlight begin to slant green through the ferns hanging from the pergola. There she stayed, her body lulled into stillness, inhaling the odour of autumn chrysanths and the sweet, worn scent of roses faint amidst the smell of the morning’s dew. She felt Jia move to sit beside her, then, moments later, a soft nudge as the other woman’s heavy head dropped onto her shoulder. A thick, black braid slid against Anju’s calf, but otherwise Jia was still, her eyes closed and her neck craned so that the sun played across her exposed collarbone. A jade pendant lay in the hollow of her throat, from her ears dangled milk-white pearl earrings fashioned in the shape of tears, and the pockets of her robe were accented with threads of blooming wisteria. Examining the pale green robe and its faded golden embroidery flickering with the sunlight, it occurred to Anju that these were the few possessions Jia had been permitted to carry with her from another life.  
  
“Are you sure you’re okay?” Anju pressed. She felt a gust of warm air and the sensation of rising gooseflesh as Jia laughed into the crook of her neck.  
  
“Life has been happening…very quickly,” she murmured. “What about you? You look completely exhausted. Have you been sleeping?” She lifted her head, draped an arm around Anju’s shoulder, then pressed Anju’s head against the basin of her neck. Gently, she stroked her cheek and the small hairs at her forehead and temples.

“I haven’t been sleeping so well, actually.” Anju closed her eyes. Dimly she was aware of Jia murmuring something about the effects of sleep-deprivation into her hair. She could make out the trace scents of brown sugar and vanilla extract.

“Can I ask you about something?” Jia’s voice was barely above a whisper now.  
  
“As long as it doesn’t make it harder for me to sleep.”  
  
Jia began a quiet laugh, then immediately pinched the bridge of her nose. “Can’t promise that. But it’s more like a request. Is a request.” She gave a soft sigh. “I was wondering…if you could look after Tifa for a while. John and I are going to Midgar to ‘discuss the new direction of our organisation’ with Deepa. And to take care of—” her voice faltered. “—recent events.”

Anju was quiet. The euphemism had not been lost on her. No more than ten days ago, Jia had appeared at her doorstep in the late hours of the night, her face drawn and her voice uncharacteristically impassive.

There had been an explosion.

Located in Midgar’s eastern borough of Rongu, the collective had established themselves in a modest but well-equipped compound that served as both a research nexus and housing facility. The combustion had occurred in the early morning, in the laboratory main. Fuelled by then-undiscovered natural hazards buried beneath the campus, it rapidly became an uncontainable conflagration that resisted the efforts of first responders. Many of the initial evacuees, worried for the safety of both family members and colleagues, had chosen to launch rescue attempts and been caught unawares by the sudden expansion of flames. John’s brother had been amongst them. He had disappeared back into the compound in search of their parents, and all three had been declared missing until four days ago, when crisis response pulled from the cinders what of them remained.  

There was nothing that Anju could say that seemed adequate. And whenever she’d try to broach the subject, Jia would gently redirect the conversation. Even now, she could do more than nod as she felt her words drying up in her throat. She imagined John’s family as she remembered them: his brother, a raffish young man with a crooked grin and a short cap of spikey black hair, his parents, constantly doting on their granddaughter. She could think of few worse resting places than that vast eastern wasteland with the overflowing capital city at its centre, a tumour of people on the earth. She struggled to construct something intelligible.

“Is John—is he okay?”

“No.” Jia’s face crumpled into an expression of exquisite misery. “How could he be? But he doesn’t want to worry Tifa.”

Anju felt her jaw slacken. “You mean she doesn’t know?” The only reply was the slight incline of Jia’s head. Finally Anju managed, “Is that…is that a good idea?”

“No—I don’t—” Jia’s voice cracked. “I don’t know. I’ve been trying not to think about it.”

Hearing the tremor in Jia’s voice, Anju clasped the other woman’s hands with her own. Gently, after Jia’s trembling had subsided, she changed the subject.  
  
“So how long do you think you’ll be gone?”  
  
Instead of answering, Jia seemed to look past Anju, focused on a plump ladybird lazily drifting through the air and onto a chrysanthemum. Still watching the flutter of its wings, she spoke.

“When I was little, there used to be this old clock in my room, right? I was so afraid of the sound of its second hand. I grew increasingly terrified of the passage of time. My grandmother, to calm my fear, muffled the clock so it didn’t make a sound. I remember her telling me, ‘It’s okay now; you have nothing to be afraid of.’” Her voice dropped, and her gaze shifted until they were staring into each other’s eyes. “But…it wasn’t okay. Grandma did die, didn’t she?”

For a moment, there was silence between them; no words were spoken as their fogs of breath dissipated into the air with the last tendrils of the unanswered question.

“Now you’re starting to scare me,” Anju said quietly.

Jia apologised with a muted laugh. “I’m sorry. It’s just that Rongu….” She trailed off.

No doubt thoughts of Tifa weighed heavily, brought back the memories of her own early loss. Anju brushed her fingers over her cheek where the sensation of Jia’s touch had lingered.

“We’ll be on a plane to the coast,” Jia continued, “but we’re taking ship to Junon and back again. So at least three weeks, maybe more, depending on how long it takes for security clearance to enter the capital.”

“Is that…safe?”

“From what I heard, there are new travel restrictions. They’re trying to close the net by screening everyone coming and going. The MNN-TV coverage and the Core Committee’s official statement the next day both claimed it was an ‘unsuccessful attack with only minor casualties caused by structural failure.’” A pause. “But most of the survivors say they remember three separate explosions, not one. One that collapsed the central facility. One at the archives and materials lab. And another one, much later, from the direction of housing.”

“So that terrorist group took responsibility?”  
  
“That’s what’s being reported,” Jia confirmed softly. For a moment, this hung in the air.

IT IS NO SIN TO RESIST VIOLENCE

The slogan leapt unbidden into Anju’s mind. What had begun as a western irredentist movement against the demand for open ports and extraterritorial rights for foreign institutions, had gradually metamorphosed into the claim of being “nature defending itself.” They had vowed to fight a holy war ordained by the biosphere, and what at first seemed like a metaphorical declaration of radical zeitgeist and political intention eventually gave way to reveal that what they wanted was a real war with real bloodshed.

“In any case.” Jia ran a finger over her eyebrow, a delicate movement that caused her eyelashes to flutter like a butterfly opening its wings. “In any case,” she repeated, almost to herself.

“So the entire retinue’s going?”  
  
“No. Lee and his group are staying behind to make sure the water systems and the rest of the arrays don’t malfunction.”  
  
“And Dr Bahati?”  
  
“Eshna’s the acting primary investigator while we’re gone. She wants to go, but—we can’t just take the medical staff and leave.”  Jia brought her hand to forehead briefly and closed her eyes with a pained grimace. “Luckily, none of her family lived in that bloc. Her parents are just outside Junon, and the rest are still in Yola, back in Akogo. She doesn’t have any relatives in Midgar.” She turned to Anju with a rueful smile, her voice suddenly and purposefully lighter. “Don’t make fun of me, but I’m actually nervous. I’ve never been away from Tifa this long.”

“I think that’s called ‘parental separation anxiety,’” Anju teased. But even as she said it, she felt equal disconcertion at the thought of leaving Cloud for more than a day. He withdrew easily, bored quickly, and often was dismissed as an inarticulate sparrow of a boy. Certain objects frightened him and he refused to go near them. He wouldn’t touch the carved wooden doorknobs at the old schoolhouse. He claimed the bark on an old maple tree in town had made a face at him.

They stayed for a half hour more, watching as the sun finally burnt away the last remnants of the morning mist. As they stood to leave, Jia drew Anju into a tight hug that seemed equal parts gratitude and desperation. With a whispered thank you, they temporarily parted ways: Jia to confirm their itinerary, and Anju back to her kitchen to confirm her inventory one last time.

As she knelt at the cupboard, a shadow passed over her open doorway. She started, then placed a hand on her chest to calm herself as she recognised John’s familiar form blocking the doorframe.  
  
“You scared me.”

“Sorry. May I come in?” Seeing her gesture to follow, he stepped inside and walked to the opposite side of the narrow counter where she stood. “Did Jia already talk to you?”

“About your—business trip? Yes. Of course. You didn’t even need to ask.”  
  
He gave a slight nod. For the first time, she noticed the small duffel that was flung over his shoulder. Slowly, he unzipped the bag and began to pull out and place stacks of bills on the counter, two rows and four bricks in all. She stared at the blue-accented, cheery red-brown notes uncomprehendingly. The eyes of the dead men gazed sightlessly back at her.

Seeing her confusion, John gave the money a deliberate look and pushed it towards her. Cautiously, slowly, she let her gaze drift up to his face. His eyes were like two empty swallows’ nests dangling from the eaves.  
  
“What is this?” His lips parted. But he said nothing as he looked at her for a while, as if he couldn’t quite believe he’d heard her correctly. “That’s not necessary,” she clarified.  
  
“We don’t expect you to pay an entire month’s worth of food and expenses out of pocket. It’ll be on a wire.”  
  
“So then this—”  
  
“This is different.”  
  
Anju stared at him silently before sliding the heavy pile of bills back over the counter. She shook her head. “Look, Jia must have misunderstood,” she ventured. “It’s just a favour. I’ll tell her—”  
  
“No.”  
  
“I…don’t know what she told you, but we didn’t discuss anything like this.”  


There was a small incline of his head in acknowledgment. “I know.”

“Then—”  
  
Sensing another refusal, he immediately interrupted. “It’s not just a cup of sugar I’m asking from you.” The expression on his face hadn’t changed, but somehow, perhaps only in her head, Anju thought she felt from him a faint agitation.

“It’s…the least I can do, considering…I—it’s not that big a deal, John.”  
  
“Yes. It is.”  He shifted subtly. It was a slight movement, but the undulation of his spine unnerved her, as if she had watched an oak root itself in the earth. “As long as we’re gone, you are the sole guardian and sole custodian. Do you understand what I’m saying?”  
  
They stared at each other until she could no longer take the intensity of his gaze. Her eyes slid past him, down to a square of light that warmed her hands. Her eyes began to blur, as if there were slight tears at the edge of her vision, and she suddenly felt a bit lightheaded. A thought had occurred to her. She blinked once, twice.

“You can’t be serious.” There was a faint ringing in her ear as she felt blood pump into the back of her head. Dimly, she was aware of her voice coming from somewhere far away, breathless and tinny.  
  
“I am serious. It’s not something I expect to be taken lightly. Nor is it a gesture I take for granted.”  He shifted again, planting the weight of his body onto his left foot. “My daughter is your daughter.”

“That’s—I can’t—” She found herself stuttering. “But I don’t want this.”

His face remained neutral, but this time Anju felt a powerful aura, a wave of frustration that was almost palpable, like she was being pushed back by a gale wind.  
  
“Then throw it away. Burn it if you have to.” He pushed away from the counter. “I don’t care what you do with it. Because it’s yours.” He about-faced, and with a few long strides, he had disappeared out the door.

Anju remained. Almost subconsciously, she backed away from the counter, unsettled. All she could do was wait for her racing heart to calm and listen to the ragged whir of her own breath. She wanted to snatch the bills, toss them in the bin and walk away. But she couldn’t. She looked at the money once more. After a long while, she began to move again. She retrieved a length of cheesecloth, wrapped the bills, and pushed them to the farthest corner of the cupboard drawer.

  
****  


AS CLOUD CLIMBED THE STAIRS, THE SOUND OF THE PIANO GREW LOUDER. Eventually he could make out the back of Tifa’s head, her long fishtail braid swaying behind her as she leaned into the notes. He slid the tray onto the nearby table, trying his best not to disturb her, but she seemed to catch sight of him from the corner of her eye.

“Cloud!” The music ended with a sour bang as she slapped her hands on the keys while jumping off the bench to greet him. She ran up to him, threw her arms around his neck and gave him a kiss on the cheek. Then she was bouncing around him, running her hands through his hair with excitement. “I missed you! Where have you been? I haven’t seen you at school in a _million_ years!”

“I don’t go anymore,” he explained. “Ms Creedy teaches me at home now.”  
  
He was shocked that she had even noticed his absence. They hadn’t often played together. It seemed like every time they got to the school, she was immediately carried off by a wave of friends to places he didn’t dare follow. Once this happened, she seemed too distracted to even remember him. And besides, he was in the year ahead of her.

“Awww,” she pouted. She pulled him down to the piano bench. “But it’s so fun! The big kids brought us ice cream to give us good luck on a test.” And then she was off. She told him about the argument the class had over the best flavour of sherbet. Then she moved on to how she liked science, but hated how they had to kill poor little plants by harvesting them for a classification assignment, and how she was top of the class at math, but let Trace copy her homework when he’d forgotten to do his, and he’d somehow gotten a better mark.

She seemed to have stored up weeks of conversation and couldn’t wait to let it all out. But Cloud didn’t care. He was content to sit there listening with her arm linked in his and pastries stuffed in his cheeks.

“Oh!” Tifa cried at last. “We went on our field trip on Friday!”  
  
Cloud nodded. No surprises there. There were only a few throughout the entire school career. The teenagers pooled funds to go out of town, but everyone knew the first school trip was just to the rice paddies to learn about ecosystems. Secretly, he felt sorry for everyone else. There was nothing even half as interesting as the forests. But he also felt just a tiny bit smug knowing that no one else would ever seen some of the things that he had.

Tifa made a face. “We were supposed to go to the pond today, but Alex, Trace, and Julien got grounded from playing outside ‘cause they caught a giant waterbug and put it in Ms Kateb’s desk.” She placed a finger on a key. “So now I just have to stay inside and practise some more. But I can only practise half of it anyway, ‘cause it’s for four hands.”  
  
“There are people with _four_ hands?”  
  
She considered this for a moment. “Maybe, but I think this one, you’re supposed to have two people playing at the same time.” A light seemed to flicker on in her head. “You can play with me!”  
  
Cloud was silent for a moment. “I don’t know how,” he admitted cautiously. He hoped she wouldn’t be angry with him.

Tifa jumped up from the bench, snatched a laminated poster from the wall, then sat back down again. “It’s easy,” she said. “Look.”

Cloud looked at the poster, but didn’t understand what he was supposed to be seeing. It appeared to be some kind of circle diagram with letters and number signs arranged inside of it.

“It’s just like the alphabet,” Tifa continued. “Only, you just have to remember up to ‘G.’” She gestured to the pages of sheet music in front of them, but they were nothing more to Cloud than jumbled hieroglyphs that made him slightly dizzy.

They sat for a time, Tifa playing a melody on one side, and he creating a sour cacophony on the other, but after hours of couching through his guesswork, the best he could do was locate middle C. Tifa didn’t seem to mind, but he was afraid that she’d bore of his uselessness and get annoyed. Carefully, he changed the subject.

“Did you hear the new episode of _Midnight Macabre_?” It was his favourite radio programme, and aired only once a week.  
  
Tifa stopped.  
  
“Yes!”

Cloud began to smile now, relieved to have found common ground. “The one about the girl who turned into a fly?”

“And the one about the boy who grew hair all over on full moons!” She narrowed her eyes at him. “ _You_ don’t grow hair or anything like that, do you?”  
  
“Never,” Cloud promised.

They talked about radio shows, comics, and then the stories Cloud’s mother had told him about the dangers that lurked beyond the mountains.

“My mom says there are all kinds of things out there. Like zuus.”  
  
Tifa seemed sceptical. “Well, my mom says that lots of big cities have zoos.”

“There are giant snakes too,” Cloud continued, nonplussed. “So big that they’re taller than a skyscraper.”

“Woah,” Tifa gasped appreciatively. “What’s a skyscraper?”

“A really big building.”

“How big?”

“I don’t know, but she says that they’re really, really big. Bigger than your house. Even bigger than the inn.”

“ _Woah_.”

 “Do you know about the bahba velamyu?”  
  
“What’s the bahba velamyu?”  
  
“A kind of bad animal.”

“How bad?” Tifa said with interest.

“Really bad. It sucks _blood._ ”  
  
“That sounds gross.” Tifa moved closer to him.

“It is! It’s big and fleshy, it’s got huge claws, and a mouth with rows and rows of teeth. It has a poison that makes your throat close up so you can’t talk, then it slows your body down so much your lungs stop working.”  
  
“You’re kidding!”

He shook his head. “My mom told me it can shapeshift too, so it can have the face of a man. The only way to tell is the eyes.”

“Ugh!”  
  
“It likes horses and cows best, but it’ll eat kids and adults too, if it’s really hungry.”  
  
Tifa was pressed right up against him now. She’d wrapped her arms around him tightly enough that he was beginning to lose his breath. He noticed that her hands were icy.  
  
“Last month it got a whole coop of Mr Nizan’s chickens,” said Cloud.  
  
“I heard about that. My dad told me it was just forest foxes.”  
  
“That’s just what they said to keep everyone from running and screaming in abject terror,” Cloud countered, repeating the words his mother had used. “But they really found what was left of them out in the cornfields. Some of the bodies were still in one piece, but they didn’t have any blood in them. Not one drop. They were blowing around like old corn husks.”  
  
Cloud knew he was babbling now, but he was unable to stop. Tifa’s interest drew him to greater and heights, and he ground his teeth from the sheer anxiety. She hung on to his every word as if her life depended on it. Never had he received this kind of attention. His mother tried to listen to him, but she was always so tired, and words were useless with everyone else. They always seemed to let him down when he needed them most—he simply couldn’t speak. His mouth dammed up so that the words tumbled back down into his throat. There they would stay, piling higher and higher in the centre of his chest until they became a ball so large and heavy that they pressed against his lungs and stopped his breath.

Cloud had read books and comics about other kids and seen that they were rarely alone. Other children did things together, like kick balls, or build forts, or get into fights. Even fighting seemed interesting if it meant you had someone to do it with. But the children at school had not wanted to build hideouts, play with him, or even speak to him. They made fun of his silence and mocked him for how small he was. He couldn’t bring himself to fight them, and this increased his shame.

But Tifa was different. She was his size, and talking to her never made him feel bad. Meanwhile, he had discovered the delightful power in repeating the stories his mother had told him.  
  
“That’s not even the worst thing out there.” His voice had dropped to a dramatic whisper. “You have to hang charms to keep away dead people who aren’t ready to stay in their graves.”  
  
Tifa murmured something. Her face was pressed to his chest, making it impossible to hear what she was saying.

“There’s a lady who’s trapped underneath the well. She lived hundreds of years ago, before Nibelheim was built. A long, long time ago, she was named Onyo and married to a man who was chief of the village that used to be here. Even though they’d been married for years, the chief never had an heir. When the woman heard that the chief was going to get married again, she went to a medicine woman that she met in the mountains and asked for a spell that she could cast on him. But it didn’t work. And when the village found out what she did, she was cursed by the chief’s shaman. Her black hair turned long and scraggly, like snakes. Her body got all twisted up like a monster’s, and a big mouth with huge, sharp teeth opened up on the back of her head. Seeing how she’d changed, she ran off into the mountains before anyone could see her.” Cloud took a breath. “After a long time, she finally returned to the village, only to find out that the chief had remarried, and had two kids already. She was so mad that she drowned him and his wife in the well, then she grabbed the children by the ankles and her second mouth swallowed them whole. Then she felt so guilty that she drowned herself in the well too. When her soul tried to pass through the mountains, the guardian spirit shouted, ‘You evil woman! You can’t pass here without those children!’ So now her ghost is trapped inside the well. She can only come out when it rains hard and it starts to flood. She wails, ‘Oooo….ooooo, where are the children.’ You can hear her when the wind blows. She comes to window and scratches it with her long claws, and she grabs any kids who—”  
  
“Stop!” shrieked Tifa. “I told you to stop already! Why don’t you listen?”  
  
Cloud froze. Had there been something wrong with the story? He’d tried to tell it exactly as his mother had.  
  
“There’s no such thing as Onyo! You made that up!”  
  
“I didn’t.”  
  
“Well, if she’s real, I don’t want to hear it!”

His throat tightened up. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. He hadn’t meant to upset her. He touched her face. “Are you crying?” She batted his hand away.

“I am not, you dummy! I just hate horrible stories!”

She looked like she was going to say more when her father appeared at the top of the stairs.  
  
“Why the yelling?” he called to them. “What’s wrong?”

As he approached the two of them, Tifa’s face drew into a scowl.

“Cloud scared me,” she sniffled.  
  
Cloud shrank back and his eyes began to burn. He prepared himself for the inevitable scolding as Mr Lockhart crouched in front of them.

“Cloud did?”

“Yes!”

But the man simply stared at Tifa. He cast a look of faint disbelief at Cloud, then looked back to his daughter. He placed a large hand on her head.

“It’s all right. I’m sure he didn’t mean to.” He stood up again, picking Tifa up with one arm and collecting the half-emptied platter from the table with a grunt. “She really shouldn’t have given you these before dinner.” He motioned to Cloud, who followed them down the stairs, eyes downcast.

He sat obediently at the table, only wondering briefly if Tifa wasn’t too old to be carried. Mr Lockhart stood with her at the windows, pulling back the drapes to allow in more of the dwindling afternoon sun.

“Is the light too bright?”

Tifa shook her head, seemingly already recovered. Mr Lockhart sat her down next to Cloud and set their plates in front of them. Some kind of grilled fish and rice pilaf, the only thing he didn’t like about the dish were the cherry tomatoes that garnished the salad. But it didn’t matter. He didn’t have much of an appetite anyway. He pushed his food around the plate, wondering if Tifa was ignoring him and trying to make himself as small as possible as she chattered with her father.

“Julien says that people could digest razorblades if they ate them,” Tifa began.  
  
Mr Lockhart’s eyebrows rose. “Don’t eat razorblades, please.”

“He also said that people can still be alive even if they take out most of their insides.”  
  
“Don’t do that either.”

Tifa made a face. “I’m not. But is it true?”  
  
Mr Lockhart seemed to consider this for a moment. “You should ask Mama.”

  
“I _did._ She told me to ask _you._ So is it true?”  


“I guess so,” he replied. “It could be.”  


“You mean you don’t _know_?”  


“I don’t know.”  


She wrinkled her nose at him. “But aren’t you and Mama doctors?”  


Mr Lockhart’s mouth twitched. “Not that kind of doctor.”

Cloud silently rearranged the rice on his plate. He’d read something similar somewhere, but didn’t want to draw attention to himself. He was still pushing making patterns of his greens when Tifa pushed back her chair and announced that she was finished and wanted to play outside.

Mr Lockhart shook his head. “I don’t believe that’s a good idea. And it looks like it may rain.”  
  
“But you said I could if I did all my scale exercises,” Tifa argued.

“I did say that,” her father replied, sounding mildly surprised.

“You’re _always_ forgetting things lately.”  
  
“Am I?”  
  
“Yes!”  
  
“No, I have a photographic memory. I just ran out of film when I turned thirty.”

Tifa made a face at him. “No wonder. That was a long time ago.”  
  
“Four years is not a long time.”

“Not to you, ‘cause you’re _old_.”

“I am not,” Mr Lockhart protested. But his mouth was quirked into a half-smile.

“Yes, you _are_. You’re older than Mama. You’re even older than Uncle Lou.”  
  
There was a brief silence. For the first time, Cloud allowed himself to raise his eyes and steal a glance at Mr Lockhart. His face had gone blank, as if he hadn’t heard what Tifa had said. After a moment, he pushed his chair back and began to clear the table.  
  
“Well. It’s fine. But only out front, not at the pond. I’m expecting an important call, so I can’t take you. Do you still have the umbrella Dr Bahati gave you?”

“No.”

“No?”

“I buried it.”

“You _buried_ it?”  
  
“And my glasses.”

There was another short silence as Mr Lockhart stood, speechless. “ _Why_?” He asked finally.

“Outside doesn’t hurt my eyes anymore.” Tifa explained. “And Mama says that if you get an umbrella without paying for it, it’s bad luck. You get cursed and fall into little pieces.”

Cloud thought that this was the most ridiculous thing that he had ever heard, but Mr Lockhart just started to smile again.  
  
“Mama says a lot of things. Who knows? Maybe she’s right.” Then he added soberly, “But I did pay for that umbrella.”

After the plates had been moved, Tifa disappeared outside. Cloud stayed rooted in his chair, his eyes still fixed on the table. He could feel Mr Lockhart’s eyes on him, but the man said nothing and eventually disappeared into his office. Cloud was relieved. If he didn’t follow Tifa around and draw attention to himself, he wouldn’t remind her to be angry at him.

He sat alone quietly until the afternoon sun dwindled into grey shadows and he could see the gas lamps flicker on from the window. Eventually, Mr Lockhart re-emerged from his office and called Tifa inside. After making sure they washed and brushed their teeth, he put Tifa to bed and led Cloud to a large, empty guest room that Cloud thought was far too big for him, then disappeared out the door.

 

****

 

RAIN FELL THAT NIGHT. It was a gentle but persistent rain, and even when Cloud closed his eyes to the darkness, he could hear it tapping on the roof and whispering at the windowpanes. The gibbous moon had sailed up into the sky like a lemon kite, and it cast silver wisps of light that struggled to penetrate the thick fabric of the curtains.

Cloud shifted in the bed, his breath stopping as he caught the sound of someone opening the door. He lay still until he heard a pair of feet pattering up to the side of his bed. A flashlight shone in his face.

“Good. I was afraid you were already asleep.” A small shape shifted in the darkness, unslung a backpack, and began to rummage through it.  
  
“Tifa?” called Cloud.  
  
“ _Shhh!_ ” She hissed. “Don’t be so loud! I’m not supposed to leave my room after bedtime, so you can’t tell Daddy, okay?” She made a face. “If Daddy finds out, then he’ll tell Mama. And if Mama knows, I’ll have to do extra B-flat scales.” She grabbed a handful of his shirt, drawing the collar tight around his throat. “You have to promise, okay? Really promise, okay? Really really promise, okay?”

“I promise,” he gurgled. He tapped her hand and she suddenly released him.

After seeing his agreement, Tifa seemed to relax. She went back to searching through whatever it was that she had packed in her knapsack.

Cloud was silent. “You’re not mad?” he managed timidly.

“Mad?” The reply seemed confused.

When Cloud didn’t respond, she went back to her bag. After a while she seemed satisfied, and moved towards him. He felt a cracker press against his lips.

“Eat it,” Tifa whispered. “I could only get cheese and pepperoni to go with it.”  
  
“I’m not hungry.” Cloud’s stomach growled. He quickly turned away, hoping she hadn’t heard, but it was too late. His empty gut felt like a deep hole that made his whole body tremble.

Tifa held the flashlight under her chin so he could see her scowl.

“I saw you. You barely ate anything at dinner. And I always get sick when I don’t eat.” She poked his face. “Eat it.”

She prodded his mouth with the food until he gave in. When she seemed satisfied that he was full, she held a plastic nozzle to his lips. Something fluid filled his mouth, then a rush of sweetness.

“It’s mango yoghurt smoothie,” Tifa whispered. “Do you like it? It’s Mama’s favourite.”

Cloud took the bottle from her and downed half of it in one gulp.

Outside, the rain had intensified. A sudden flash of lightning bleached the room white, and the explosive thunder that followed made them both jump.

“There aren’t any charms here,” Tifa murmured nervously. Her voice sounded high and breathless.  

The thought had also occurred to Cloud, but he hadn’t wanted to mention it.

“Well, your dad’s in the house, so it should be okay,” he assured her.  
  
“But there’s _no_ one in the halls. If I go outside, Onyo’ll get me.”  
  
“It’s not raining that hard, so maybe she won’t.”  
  
“Oh, great! _Maybe_ she won’t!”  
  
Cloud didn’t know what to say.

“I’ll have to stay until it’s morning time,” Tifa decided. “I’m gonna get in really big trouble, but at least I won’t get eaten. Move over.”  
  
He shifted, wincing when she elbowed him in the chest as she clambered over to the far side of the bed.

She rolled to face him. “Do you have a blanket?”  
  
“No.”  
  
“How come?”  
  
“I took it off ‘cause I didn’t want to drool on it.”  

There was a frustrated sigh in the dark, then a small gasp of revelation. She sat up and reached for his bookbag hanging from the headboard, then emptied his socks onto the bed.

“We don’t need covers,” Cloud objected, as Tifa began to arrange them over their bodies.

“Well, they make me feel safer.” She snuggled closer to him. “See this isn’t so bad.”  
  
Cloud turned away from her, his mind churning over what punishment she’d have to endure because she brought him food. He still wasn’t exactly sure what a B-flat scale was, but it sounded horrible.

Eventually his worry gave way to drowsiness. Beside him, he could hear Tifa snoring softly. Just as he began to drift off, he felt her begin to squirm in her sleep. She flung her arms out, then began to kick, and very soon after, Cloud found himself lying face down on the floor. He sat up. He touched his forehead—where he was sure there was a rapidly forming knot—and cast a glance at the bed. Tifa was splayed across the mattress, and he didn’t think he could climb back on without waking her. Dimly, the memory of the well-cushioned decorative chairs in the hall came to him. He stood up and quietly pushed open the door, hoping no one would mind if he used one for the night.

From downstairs, the orange glow of lamplight cast high shadows on the walls. The censers had all been cleaned for the night, but the haze of incense had left its scent thick in the air. Cloud froze at the top of the staircase. He could hear something that sounded like a muffled voice drifting in through the gloom. Carefully, he made his way down.

The living room looked like it had been torn apart by a storm. Piles of journals lay open and scattered across the table, and reams of paper spilled onto the floor. Cloud picked one up, struggling to read in the weak light.

_[Rice reactor configuration]_

_With intention to apply TILLING to rice: developed two mutagenised populations. One population developed by treating with mutagen ethy methanesulphonate (EMS), and the other, by treating with combination of sodium azide and methyl-nitrosourea (Az-MNU). In order to find induced mutations, target regions of 0.7-1.5 kilobases PCR-amplified using gene specific primers sorted with fluorescent dyes. Heteroduplexes formed through denaturation and annealing of PCR products, mismatches digested with crude CEL I nuclease preparation and cleaved fragments visualised with denaturing polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis. Screen 10 target genes; 27 nucleotide changes in EMS-treated populations and 30 in Az-MNU population. We estimate that density of induced mutations is two, threefold higher than previously reported rice populations (est. 1/300 kb). Conclude that populations described suitable for use in large scale TILLING project._

He stared. He wasn’t familiar with most of the words, and had even less of an idea what they meant together.

There came a loud thump like a fist hitting a desk, and he felt himself jump at the sound reflexively. From ahead, he could see light streaming out Mr Lockhart’s office. Moving closer, he saw that the door was slightly ajar. Now he realised where the voices he’d heard had come from. Mr Lockhart stood with his back to Cloud, leaning over his worktable and speaking into a phone pressed to his ear.

“Pray? Pray my ass! The explosions already happened, so who the fuck are we praying to? Does anyone actually believe in Da-chao or Minerva or An or Youdu? Throwing yourself at the foot of some shrine because it’s suddenly convenient, do you _even_ know how shameless that is?”

The rage in his voice made Cloud flatten into himself. It seemed that he was attempting to be quiet, but Mr Lockhart’s voice was steadily growing in volume from barely controlled hiss.

“We don’t need to be praying right now! We need to be finding out who the hell did this and why! How would anyone get information about our facilities, and why the hell would a terra primum group purposely target an alt-E research collective? How could there possibly have been rufium or chrom-6 or NORM underneath that bloc when it was surveyed before construction and was supposedly MENAH compliant? Why didn’t they drop the domes to contain the fires at the first possible opportunity? If they already knew about the risk of additional combustions, why did risk control order survivors back to their homes when they knew it was dangerous?”

A pause.

“Fuck the CCM! The Committee can eat shit!”

There was an abrupt click as Mr Lockhart ended the call. Before Cloud could react, he had strode across the room and flung open the door, and was staring into the hallway.

Cloud recoiled. Mr Lockhart’s face was deep purple, and his lips had curled back to reveal two rows of large, blunt teeth. His eyes were wide, bloodshot, and hard-edged, rolling around like dice in his head. On the far side of his right jaw, a thick vein pulsated.

“ _You_ —” he hissed.

Then, just as rapidly, the colour drained from his face. His lips folded themselves back over his teeth, and the creases in his brow straightened until his face was a smooth mask.  

Cloud could scarcely breathe. The transformation terrified him.

“You shouldn’t be awake.” Mr Lockhart knelt and placed a hand on Cloud’s hair, scooped him up in an arm, then carried him back to the guest room before he could register what was happening.

With Cloud in one arm and a lantern in the other, Mr Lockhart peered into the room. He stared at the bed. Tifa was still lying there, wriggling around beneath the mountain of socks.

Looking at her, then at Cloud, he shook his head with a sigh. After putting down the lantern and clearing the socks, he gently laid Cloud onto the bed and lifted Tifa out of it. He retrieved a blanket from the closet, and with his free arm, pulled it up to Cloud’s neck. Then, wordlessly, he picked up his lantern and disappeared into the hall.

For a while, Cloud lay there, feeling his heart race in the dark. After an hour more, his eyes grew heavy, and he was lulled into sleep by a roll of thunder.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ............So. About that update. I said it'd be in April, but I didn't say which April, am I right? (Smh.)
> 
> In any case, reflecting on the direction of this story has been a bit of a trip. When I originally started it seven years ago, it was meant to be a novella-length, third-person limited bildungsroman told from Cloud's perspective only. A lot of things have been switched around, inserted, and outright deleted since then. And I also realised I couldn't tell the type of story I wanted with only one point-of-view. 
> 
> So I guess what I'm saying is: a lot of the major characters are (technically) OCs, as canon tells us little to nothing about them. That they are integral to this story - which revolves around relationships - is something that I hope isn't too off-putting. And I hope that I can do justice to them.
> 
> ...............
> 
> I also just wanna warn you all (all 2.5 of you reading) that ion't proofread anything I write (lmao, no editing, we die like [wo]men). Partially because I'm lazy, but mostly because I know if I read anything I've written I will half-die of cringe and throw it out because I hate it immediately. 
> 
> I did, however, read the last update so I could give myself a refresher...and man...the typos. So apologies for that. At one point, I even described the mountains as being to the north of town...but then said the sun went down between the mountainpeaks. In the north. Was it stupid? Yes. Will I change it? Well....
> 
> Anyway, a last apology for this chapter being so exposition heavy (Nothing Happens: The Chapter). It also somehow manages to be a little over 25 pages, so if the target of 15 - 20 pages an update is too high (and unreadable), feel free to shoot me a comment.

**Author's Note:**

> Original Author's Note from FFN: A biopic look at Cloud and Tifa's childhood friendship up until the events that lead Cloud into SOLDIER. I don't think there are enough friendship fics, so I decided to write one. Admittedly though, I'm a hardcore Cloud/Tifa shipper, so the story may lean (hint) that way anyhow, so the second category is listed under "romance" for safety's sake. This first chapter is told as the recollection of a memory. Cloud is about four here, and Tifa is three (though I don't think I characterised that well). The story will continue from there. The rating will probably change to "T" as they get older.
> 
> Original End Note from FFN: Can't say I'm particularly pleased with this chapter. It kind of was rushed, and I think I didn't quite hit the tone I was aiming for. It was all over the place. I avoided dialogue to convey a fuzzy, ethereal memory-type mood, but I don't think I achieved that, either. Ah, well. I may edit it later. But what do YOU think? Leave me a review and tell me!
> 
> And for clarification's sake, it's Cloud's mother's birthday, not Cloud's.


End file.
